Top 120 Carrie Brownstein Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.”

— Carrie Brownstein

52. “Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow.”

— Carrie Brownstein

53. “You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.”

— Carrie Brownstein

54. “Anyone we truly love should come with their own dictionary.”

— Carrie Brownstein

55. “Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly. I.”

— Carrie Brownstein

56. “Perhaps this was depression, a murkiness that distorted and disabled connection. I drifted in and out of this darkness, pulled away, then reappeared.”

— Carrie Brownstein

57. “Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something – survived it, experienced it – is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something.”

— Carrie Brownstein

58. “It’s hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.”

— Carrie Brownstein

59. “Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived.”

— Carrie Brownstein

60. “No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don’t wish smallness for anyone. It’s a terrible place to live.”

— Carrie Brownstein

61. “I think in some ways, whether you’ve ever actually been to Portland, people definitely understand this highly curated niche lifestyle, because a lot of people are sort of striving for that now. Or they’re hating on it.”

— Carrie Brownstein

62. “I think hypochondria always plays a part in the healthcare landscape.”

— Carrie Brownstein

63. “With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.”

— Carrie Brownstein

64. “I think proteins are really good for your brain. And your brain is where comedy comes from.”

— Carrie Brownstein

65. “I’m interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young. I’ve never quite been able to shake that.”

— Carrie Brownstein

66. “For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.”

— Carrie Brownstein

67. “The notion of “female” should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself.”

— Carrie Brownstein

68. “As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn’t totally a foreign world.”

— Carrie Brownstein

69. “I have no desire to play music unless I need music.”

— Carrie Brownstein

70. “Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I’m not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.”

— Carrie Brownstein

71. “I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.”

— Carrie Brownstein

72. “It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.”

— Carrie Brownstein

73. “In these cases, fandom is contextual and experiential: it’s not that it happened, it’s that you were there.”

— Carrie Brownstein

74. “I’ve never understood people who play up the artifice of music.”

— Carrie Brownstein

75. “There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself.”

— Carrie Brownstein

76. “After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.”

— Carrie Brownstein

77. “I’m always trying to encourage people not to limit themselves in the same way that many of our parents stayed with one job forever.”

— Carrie Brownstein

78. “I’m really drawn to the uncompromising realness of natural process: It’s unadorned. It’s not very pretty.”

— Carrie Brownstein

79. “Art communities and music scenes want to pretend like they don’t care, but they will also tell you louder and more frequently than anyone that they DON’T CARE.”

— Carrie Brownstein

80. “I’ve always loved writing. Doing that at the same time as playing music can be tiring.”

— Carrie Brownstein

81. “It’s hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept.”

— Carrie Brownstein

82. “I’ve always felt unclaimed.”

— Carrie Brownstein

83. “She’s high,” my dad said to my mother, laughing. And I was. It was a moment I’ll never forget, a total elation that momentarily erased any outline of darkness. There was light everywhere I looked.”

— Carrie Brownstein

84. “My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins.”

— Carrie Brownstein

85. “I’ve mostly been focusing on writing, and I’ve really enjoyed not playing music. It will always be part of my life, but I don’t feel the immediate need to be playing for people.”

— Carrie Brownstein

86. “My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.”

— Carrie Brownstein

87. “I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.”

— Carrie Brownstein

88. “It was not about strength in numbers nor in size. It had nothing to do with volume. It was about surprise. It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts.”

— Carrie Brownstein

89. “That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better – it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.”

— Carrie Brownstein

90. “I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it’s how I get a lot of thinking done.”

— Carrie Brownstein

91. “Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain.”

— Carrie Brownstein

92. “Once you’re away from music, I realize that’s as intrinsic to who I am as anything else. That’s the part that takes me out of my brain.”

— Carrie Brownstein

93. “A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one’s existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm.”

— Carrie Brownstein

94. “I am a horrible visual artist. I can’t fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don’t do than do.”

— Carrie Brownstein

95. “At that age I thought apartments were built specifically to house the single or the newly single, a divorce dormitory of sorts.”

— Carrie Brownstein

96. “A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one’s existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm. What a privilege it must be to never have to answer the question “How does it feel to be a woman playing music?” or “Why did you choose to be in an all-female band?” The people who get there early have to work the hardest.”

— Carrie Brownstein

97. “I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.”

— Carrie Brownstein

98. “It’s important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn’t come too easily. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high.”

— Carrie Brownstein

99. “I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous.”

— Carrie Brownstein

100. “I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it’s a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it’s also disheartening and usinspiring.”

— Carrie Brownstein