Girls, now, they wear leggings. As pants. It's embarrassing. Just parading their conchies around town.

— Stephanie Danler

How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should super-cede them.

— Stephanie Danler

I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbish while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings.

— Stephanie Danler

I'm sick of that, I said. Young, young, young, that's what I get, all day, every day. But I know your secret.... You're all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you've taken as you've grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined. I don't have to compromise yet. I don't have to do a single thing I don't want to do. That's why you hate me.

— Stephanie Danler

I said, "It really didn't feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?

— Stephanie Danler

I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.

— Stephanie Danler

It was the day after Thanksgiving. I was the 3 p.m. backwater, but the trains were running irregularly, and while I had heard one sighing into the station as I ran down the stairs, my card was out of money. Which is to say, I was late.

— Stephanie Danler

Pigeons flew in diminishing waves between the low buildings. The sun rose. It said, Now that you've done this, you can never have that. Now that I'm like this, I can never go back.

— Stephanie Danler

She re-marked her lips with her lipstick. I saw sprays of silver in her coarse hair. I saw inscriptions of her years around her mouth, a solid crease between her brows from a lifetime of cynicism. The posture of a woman who had stood in a casual spotlight in every room she'd ever been in, not for gloss or perfection, for self-possession. Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.

— Stephanie Danler

The city was radiant and I felt untouchable.

— Stephanie Danler