Top 40 Brandon Stanton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t wait for perfect. Don’t wait for something to be fully formed in your head to start on it. Just start, and then work it out as you go.”

— Brandon Stanton

2. “People always say be true to yourself. But that’s misleading, because there are two selves. There’s your short term self, and there’s your long term self. And if you’re only true to your short term self, your long term self slowly decays.”

— Brandon Stanton

3. “Jealousy. Depression. Love. They pretty much demonstrate the whole range of human emotion.”

— Brandon Stanton

4. “I get way too sensitive when I get attached to someone. I can detect the slightest change in the tone of their voice, and suddenly I’m spending all day trying to figure out what I did wrong.”

— Brandon Stanton

5. “There are so many people that use ‘following your dreams’ as an excuse to not work. When in reality, following your dreams, successfully, is nothing but work.”

— Brandon Stanton

6. “Main thing is just to remember that hard work got me here and only hard work will keep me here.”

— Brandon Stanton

7. “If you love the wrong one so much, just imagine how much you can love the right one.”

— Brandon Stanton

8. “Lives are made of chapters. And after one is written, it cannot be revisited. But, we can write a new chapter with each new day.”

— Brandon Stanton

9. “The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.”

— Brandon Stanton

10. “HONY is one of the only things keeping people from getting lost in the matrix.”

— Brandon Stanton

11. “It’s a good poem if I’m a different person when I’m finished reading it.”

— Brandon Stanton

12. “Recently we received an invitation that proved just that.”

— Brandon Stanton

13. “In an age of iPhones and Playstations, it’s great to see that somebody’s still rocking the bus-on-a-string.”

— Brandon Stanton

14. “I’ve learned that every feeling will pass if you give it time. And if you learn to deal with your feelings, they’ll pass by faster each time. So don’t rush to cover them up by medicating them. You’ve got to deal with them.”

— Brandon Stanton

15. “Enjoy your life as long as you want, but the moment the pain becomes too much, it’s in your hands to stop it.”

— Brandon Stanton

16. “When my husband was dying, I said: Moe, how am I supposed to live without you? He told me: take the love you have for me and spread it around.”

— Brandon Stanton

17. “My worldview is this: At all times, people are doing one of two things. They’re showing love. Or they’re crying out for it.”

— Brandon Stanton

18. “Shes’s always been very accepting and patient with my trust issues. I’ve always had a hard time getting close. But no matter how many times I doubted, she just kept saying: ‘I’m not going anywhere.”

— Brandon Stanton

19. “The amplitudes of life get smaller as you age. There are less and less things to experience for the first time. And each time you experience something, you don’t get quite as excited. But you don’t get quite as hurt, either. I wonder what it will feel like when I’m seventy...”

— Brandon Stanton

20. “Great stories never end with the struggle.”

— Brandon Stanton

21. “I want to change the world but I don’t know how.”

— Brandon Stanton

22. “It seems that a lot of people my age try to be interesting by having problems or starting conflicts. I’d rather be interesting because I created something beautiful.”

— Brandon Stanton

23. “I’m a feminist. So if a woman and I are going for the last empty seat on the subway, I’m not holding back.”

— Brandon Stanton

24. “If you’re a thief, don’t complain about being robbed.”

— Brandon Stanton

25. “I have a lot of mental illness right now. Half of my energy goes into taking care of myself. I’ve been daydreaming about shaving my head fully ’cause then I’ll look as sick as I feel.”

— Brandon Stanton

26. “Who’s influenced you the most in your life?” “My principal, Ms. Lopez.” “How has she influenced you?” “When we get in trouble, she doesn’t suspend us. She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time she made every student stand up, one at a time, and she told each one of us that we matter.”

— Brandon Stanton

27. “Underneath all the laughs and the gags, it was always about one thing: survival. Tanqueray was a lot of fun. But Tanqueray was Stephanie. And Stephanie was a teenage runaway from Albany: doing what she needed to do, and being who she needed to be, to get what she needed to get.”

— Brandon Stanton

28. “If our shields are what separate us, it’s what’s behind them that brings us together: the struggles, the worries, the pain, the weakness. All the soft spots. The places we protect. These are the things that make us most relatable to others. These ads the things that connect us – if only we allow them to be seen.”

— Brandon Stanton

29. “I used to be a butcher. She used to come into my store. Every week I would set apart the best piece of meat for her. And look how it turned out – I ended up with the best piece of meat of them all.”

— Brandon Stanton

30. “The great thing about New York is that if you sit in one place long enough, the whole world comes to you.”

— Brandon Stanton

31. “The sadness is under the thoughts. It’s like when you’re on a camping trip, and it’s really cold, and you put on extra socks and an extra sweater, but you still can’t get warm, because the coldness is in your bones.”

— Brandon Stanton

32. “The more times I fall in love, the less sure I am about love.”

— Brandon Stanton

33. “It takes a lot of disquiet to achieve this sort of quiet comfort.”

— Brandon Stanton

34. “Right after I lost vision in my eye, I was so bad at walking that I ran into a girl eating ice cream, and knocked her cone out of her hand. She screamed: ‘Are you blind!?!?’ I turned to her and said: ‘I am blind actually, I’m so sorry, I’ll buy you a new cone.’ And she said: ‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry! Don’t worry! It’s no problem at all! I’ll buy another one.’ So we walked into the ice cream store together, and the clerk said: ‘I heard the whole thing. Ice cream is free.”

— Brandon Stanton

35. “She had the most beautiful awkwardness.”

— Brandon Stanton

36. “That’s the problem with growing up in a white world. You think you can do anything that white people can do.”

— Brandon Stanton

37. “It might be a cultural thing, but I was always scolded for showing emotion. Sadness was always met with anger.”

— Brandon Stanton

38. “There are two books in America: one for the poor and one for the rich. The poor person does a crime and gets forty years. A rich person gets a slap on the wrist for the same crime.”

— Brandon Stanton

39. “In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies.”

— Brandon Stanton

40. “I still dream about him almost every night. And I still sleep with a teddy bear that he gave me. He was the only one why ever knew me. It wasn’t always good – especially toward the end. But when I was with him I felt like I had a place. When I came home at night, there was somebody who actually wanted me to be there. And you can’t just let go of something like that. Especially when you’d never felt it before. And you’ve never felt it since. Carmine was the only one who ever loved Stephanie.”

— Brandon Stanton

41. “Anyone who has a two hundred-plus IQ runs the risk of just hanging out because you get too involved in your own thoughts and you just want to sit there and think about .”

— Brandon Stanton

42. “Sometimes it’s hard not to fall in love with your friends.”

— Brandon Stanton

43. “I’m trying to write a book based on myself, but i keep changing.”

— Brandon Stanton