Top 120 Jenny Slate Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There are no odds to beat anymore, just some real junk to dump. You dump your junk. After you dump it, you don’t sort it in your mind. You dump your junk and you walk away. You wear all one color on the outside, swirl with every color on the inside. You walk forward. You keep your head angled up so that you see over the fray. You protect yourself and all the little weirds that make up who you are.”

— Jenny Slate

2. “I’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.”

— Jenny Slate

3. “I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps.”

— Jenny Slate

4. “I don’t think men have time to be funny because they have to make all of our rules about what we can do with our vaginas.”

— Jenny Slate

5. “I have no regrets. The best thing to happen to me was for Lorne Michaels to hire me and fire me.”

— Jenny Slate

6. “You will be cleaned by your own focus, by not being seduced into self-indulgence.”

— Jenny Slate

7. “As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”

— Jenny Slate

8. “This is what makes my mother my mother. She loves the flower and she wants me to know this flower, but she will only smell it once, and then give it to me for unlimited sniffing pleasure and she will be happy about it all.”

— Jenny Slate

9. “I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?”

— Jenny Slate

10. “I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am.”

— Jenny Slate

11. “I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that there will always be a ribbon of loneliness running through who I am. But that’s why I want to do comedy, and why I want to connect with people. You can use that ribbon to be a part of a finer tapestry, or you can choke yourself out with it! Your choice! But I’m not gonna get rid of it. But do I want to live as a depressed person who’s afraid of other people and bummed out by the makeup of my personhood? No. So I’ll find a way.”

— Jenny Slate

12. “When people get a glimpse of me I’d like them to feel like it is a good omen.”

— Jenny Slate

13. “But what am I supposed to do with all of the parts of my heart that are only there to be given?”

— Jenny Slate

14. “I am that mysterious stranger that I hoped to meet. I met her at a dark dance. We came here to live together until I could stay by myself. The place is here. The time is now. This is all my lifetime.”

— Jenny Slate

15. “Sometimes you watch comedians and feel like they’re jerking off in front of you, but they want you to see how big it is.”

— Jenny Slate

16. “You have to be really careful to watch out for the difference between banding together, and being grouped together by people who don’t understand you.”

— Jenny Slate

17. “I want to look out a window at something bright and wide, and at that point accept my nature and understand my intended use and have a clean shirt and clean hands and feel similar to a small planet.”

— Jenny Slate

18. “A psychic recently looked right into the eternal cosmos and then returned to me with this elegant yet cryptic message: Grow up.”

— Jenny Slate

19. “I can’t become smaller to fit into a crouching love in somebody else’s meager world. I don’t do that anymore. I have calmed down. I have consolidated. I have come through the reckoning that I required.”

— Jenny Slate

20. “So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one.”

— Jenny Slate

21. “I was born on the boundary line between cold and hot, at the intersection of the two elements that make a clap of thunder.”

— Jenny Slate

22. “It occurs to me, even as I’m not sure what’s left of me, that I can use what is still alive to really behave in a way that I admire.”

— Jenny Slate

23. “I felt so ripe and sweet – what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.”

— Jenny Slate

24. “If you let me onto your land, I might be very wild, and I will not be able to totally change myself, but you can always track me by the tinkle of my lively clamor.”

— Jenny Slate

25. “I think the main thing that affected my comedy was that my dad slept in a nightgown for most of my childhood. And it was just very funny every single night and made me realize that laughter is fun and nightgowns are cool.”

— Jenny Slate

26. “Who will meet me at once in all of my worlds and pump with all of my hearts? To have to kill even one of my hearts to match up with you is simply not worth it to me, after all that has happened.”

— Jenny Slate

27. “I’d like to be in a female version of The Fugitive. Something where I don’t have to be ripped up like an action star, but be a normal, healthy lady who is framed and on the run. I’d have to run from explosions and punch people in the face but not rappel down a building.”

— Jenny Slate

28. “Being on “SNL” was a goal that I had when I was younger. When I got fired, I just felt really mad and I felt really grossed out by the system and grossed out by myself and it just sort of knocked me on my ass.”

— Jenny Slate

29. “Each time I fall in love I feel fear that the world won’t let me be in the world with it, that I either have to pick the world or the love.”

— Jenny Slate

30. “The more you give, the more you have, the more new things you are a part of, the more you are truly alive.”

— Jenny Slate

31. “Yes, there have been lots of feelings that have felt like breaths in with no out breaths.”

— Jenny Slate

32. “It occurs to me as I fight so hard with myself that these cruel and persistent voices are the echoes of trauma from the times when people treated me like I am now treating myself.”

— Jenny Slate

33. “I am a plant and I have a fragile green stem and my flower is still in the pod on the top of the stalk, unopened, when the dawn strolls in over the horizon. My blossom spreads out during the day and it goes into the pod at night and then it goes again the next day and all of the days.”

— Jenny Slate

34. “The super-ego is reiterative. It repeats the most boring, pointy, hurtful things, and if you met it at a party, if it were a person, you would think that the person was not only mean and insane, but also not as smart as they think they are. You wouldn’t listen. You would think they were a shithead.”

— Jenny Slate

35. “I’m competitive and I have a messy purse, but otherwise, I like people to think I’m a winner.”

— Jenny Slate

36. “An intention was inside of me already when I traveled from infinity to a kitchen with a windowsill, to a wish, to a woman.”

— Jenny Slate

37. “It occurs to me that if anyone ever bullies me again I will warn them one time but probably start to stop loving them, and that if they do it again I will have my final answer, that a person who does that to me does not love me. And then I will explain that their behavior has made it clear to me that I want to leave, and although I will have been clear, I will have been respectful, I will leave without participating in condemnation. I will go without digging deeper into the dark.”

— Jenny Slate

38. “Why would a woman have a bra if she was making a snack in her natural habitat, which is of course a house by the sea?”

— Jenny Slate

39. “I’m not one to wallow, but I am one to feel the sting of a slap for a while, I think.”

— Jenny Slate

40. “When I would go on stage I would start to feel that the eyes that watching me weren’t kind. And it took me a while to realize that those eyes were my own eyes.”

— Jenny Slate

41. “A lot of times what’s satisfying to me in comedy is when a woman successfully does self-care.”

— Jenny Slate

42. “But back to the sea captain and his broken heart. I somehow always felt that this was my story as well. Maybe because I was so obsessed with what it would feel like to one day fall in love, to have another person who loved you the most, and loved you so much, voluntarily, that it became involuntary.”

— Jenny Slate

43. “I feel like when I go on stage I feel so excited at the prospect that there will be a true connection.”

— Jenny Slate

44. “I have wondered on many occasions if any confidence I have is just a weird side effect of foolishness and I live under the weight of so much embarrassment, I’m surprised the top of my head isn’t flat.”

— Jenny Slate

45. “I wanted him to understand that “being vulnerable” is a different thing for everyone, is a developed and specific skill involving personally specific actions that are terrifying.”

— Jenny Slate

46. “I tend to be a bit of a workaholic, but I also can’t function without some sort of domesticity as well.”

— Jenny Slate

47. “I feel a lot of life in me and a lot of creative energy and I think it’s better suited somewhere it can run free.”

— Jenny Slate

48. “Sometimes I enact destruction just to reenact my faith that things can be built up again. But I’m trying to stop the first part of that and just have the faith.”

— Jenny Slate

49. “I want to keep growing and I want to be an actress for as long as I can.”

— Jenny Slate

50. “The women were new friends but I loved them in a massive way. The love was like a large trove of devotion that could only be amassed over time, but it had arrived all at once. The way I loved them felt like it was from long ago.”

— Jenny Slate