Top 50 Gina Barreca Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Laughing together is as close as you can get to a hug without touching.”

— Gina Barreca

2. “Birthdays are a reward for having shown up 365 days in a row. It’s like getting a badge for attendance.”

— Gina Barreca

3. “How about “diamonds are a girl’s best friends”? Nope. It should be switched around and pointed out, instead, that your best friends are diamonds.”

— Gina Barreca

4. “The search for truth can be compared to a cat chasing her tail: frantic in her pursuit, her quarry nevetheless eludes her; despite the fact that all the world can see it’s right there, it remains just beyond her reach. It cannot be possessed because, paradoxically, it is already part of her.”

— Gina Barreca

5. “Envy is what makes you, when an acquaintance is lustily telling you that she’s dating a Greek god of a guy, ask, ‘Which one, Hades?’”

— Gina Barreca

6. “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like what they like more than they don’t like what they don’t like and, in contrast, those who don’t like what they don’t like more than they like what they like.”

— Gina Barreca

7. “I have an intimate relationship with books. After all, I take them with me into the bathtub-not an invitation I offer lightly.”

— Gina Barreca

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “Never use the passive voice. Do not say, ‘It will get done.’ Say, ‘I’ll do it,’ and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline.”

— Gina Barreca

9. “Truth is like nuclear waste: it needs to be dealt with carefully. Sometimes it needs to be buried way, way out of town. And sometimes it should never be uncovered at all.”

— Gina Barreca

10. “We all enter this world crying. Laughter is something we have to learn.”

— Gina Barreca

11. “If anger were mileage, I’d be a very frequent flyer, right up there in First Class.”

— Gina Barreca

12. “While many things have changed, some things haven’t changed enough.”

— Gina Barreca

13. “The people I work with are like family. I don’t mean this in a nice way.”

— Gina Barreca

14. “Patriotism is about a desire for progress, not a yearning for repetition.”

— Gina Barreca

15. “We should remind ourselves that laughing together is as close as you can get to another person without touching, and sometimes it represents a closer tie than touching ever could.”

— Gina Barreca

16. “Having a lean and hungry look was frowned upon in my Italian neighborhood where a girl was considered too skinny if she could make her knees touch.”

— Gina Barreca

17. “Humor is a show of both strength and of vulnerability: you are willing to make the first move but you are trusting in the response of your listener.”

— Gina Barreca

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

18. “Anger is the quintessential individual-signature emotion: I am what makes me mad.”

— Gina Barreca

19. “My longing to improve my looks via The Body Shop is being replaced by my longing to improve my looks via Photoshop.”

— Gina Barreca

20. “Most cooks would not, for example, prepare an important, elaborate, and difficult dish on the back-burner. Neither should we relegate the cultivation and preparation of happiness for a position where it is both hard to reach and difficult to infuse with new ingredients.”

— Gina Barreca

21. “If you ask a server for a seriously old wine in my neighborhood, they’ll look at you funny and then bring you a half-finished glass from somebody else’s table.”

— Gina Barreca

22. “As a kid, you await holidays with a wide-eyed, passionate, almost maniacal enthusiasm. Heavy breathing is involved.”

— Gina Barreca

23. “If you know you can do it – if you can already chart every day in your future – then why bother? Choose to do something you have more trouble imagining. Take a chance.”

— Gina Barreca

24. “Think of the funniest story from your life. Chances are, it was something awful at the time.”

— Gina Barreca

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

25. “Speaking up is important. Yet to speak up without listening is like banging pots and pans together: Even if it gets you attention, it’s not going to get you respect.”

— Gina Barreca

26. “Until we’re pushing up daisies, it might be good to remind ourselves daily that everything’s coming up roses – for me and for you.”

— Gina Barreca

27. “From age sixteen to age twenty, a woman’s body is a temple. From twenty-one to forty-five, it’s an amusement park. From forty-five on, it’s a terrarium.”

— Gina Barreca

28. “Rambling speeches and bad writing litter our lives. If talk is cheap, it’s because the supply usually exceeds the demand.”

— Gina Barreca

29. “My therapist has helped me learn to understand that if you don’t unpack your own emotional baggage it’s no longer baggage – it’s deadweight.”

— Gina Barreca

30. “Not only do women hold up half the sky; we do it while carrying a 500-pound purse.”

— Gina Barreca

31. “Writers read. Writers read promiscuously, aggressively and relentlessly.”

— Gina Barreca

32. “Taking a lot of selfies doesn’t mean you live an examined life.”

— Gina Barreca

33. “More than anything else, I wanted not to be alone – yet all my actions guaranteed I’d be lonely. Like wearing a vest of explosives when you’re coming in for a hug, insatiable need is a form of sabotage.”

— Gina Barreca

34. “As a writer, I roll around in words the way cats roll around in catnip.”

— Gina Barreca

35. “Ever look at a sink full of dishes and think, “Why don’t I just bury these in the backyard?”

— Gina Barreca

36. “There are now skin products supposedly created with 24-karat gold extract. I guess if financial times got really tough, you could always pawn your own head.”

— Gina Barreca

37. “I’ve been married for a long time and there are days when I still wonder, ‘Excuse me, but who is this man?”

— Gina Barreca

38. “Want to guess what comes up when I Google “Woman discovers”? It’s not “new galaxy.” It’s “a body in her trunk” or “the unthinkable in her attic.” According to my computer search, other big discoveries by women include “her co-worker is her birth mom,” “a Renaissance painting in her kitchen,” and “her new home was once a meth lab.” Hey, at least that one contains the word “lab.”

— Gina Barreca

39. “Make your own choices before anyone else makes them for you and way before the house lights are lowered.”

— Gina Barreca

40. “Men fake sleep the way women fake orgasms: to be left alone already.”

— Gina Barreca

41. “This year’s vintage is best enjoyed this year. Let’s begin.”

— Gina Barreca

42. “In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.”

— Gina Barreca

43. “It’s only when you’re at the bottom of the ladder that you ascend.”

— Gina Barreca

44. “Power is the ability to persuade stupid people to do intelligent things and intelligent people to do stupid things. This is why power is dangerous.”

— Gina Barreca

45. “When you enter your next relationship, you become the person you split up with.”

— Gina Barreca

46. “To slur “feminism” into “humanism” is to usurp women’s voices once again, to make the singular feminine into the so-called universal masculine.”

— Gina Barreca

47. “Ask a woman if she’s ambitious and she’ll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun. Ask a woman if she’s competitive and she’ll look at you as if you suggested that she’s a hooker.”

— Gina Barreca

48. “Fate gives us relatives for one reason: so that we have to learn how to deal with people we’d otherwise never know.”

— Gina Barreca

49. “I will count my blessings when I am in the doldrums, count to ten when I am quarrelsome, and count on my friends when I need a laugh.”

— Gina Barreca

50. “Words can be as irrevocable as an action. They can cut as deeply as a surgeon’s scalpel.”

— Gina Barreca