Top 50 Jia Tolentino Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us.”

— Jia Tolentino

2. “Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized – not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door.”

— Jia Tolentino

3. “Posting photos from a protest against border family separation, as I did while writing this, is a microscopically meaningful action, an expression of genuine principle, and also, inescapably, some sort of attempt to signal that I am good.”

— Jia Tolentino

4. “I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to. Here, as in so many other things, the “thee” I dread may been the “I” all along.”

— Jia Tolentino

5. “The political philosopher Sally Scholz separates solidarity into three categories. There’s social solidarity, which is based on common experience; civic solidarity, which is based on moral obligation to a community; and political solidarity, which is based on a shared commitment to a cause. These forms of solidarity overlap, but they’re distinct from one another.”

— Jia Tolentino

6. “The last few years have taught me to suspend my desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope primarily that little truths will keep emerging in time.”

— Jia Tolentino

7. “Not all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have experienced fear because of men.”

— Jia Tolentino

8. “Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage? Of course, most protagonists are unhappy. But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.”

— Jia Tolentino

9. “All of these women are in pursuit of basic liberty. But our culture has configured women’s liberty as corrosion, and for a long time, there was no way for a woman to be both free and good.”

— Jia Tolentino

10. “Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection – this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.”

— Jia Tolentino

11. “The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will.”

— Jia Tolentino

12. “There’s a saying we have in reality,” Jess, the producer, told me, while we were sitting in Midtown. “Everyone signs. Most people want to be famous. Everyone thinks they could be a better Kardashian than the Kardashians. You see it now, with these apps, everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one.”

— Jia Tolentino

13. “The fact that everything feels like God to me ensured that I would not remain a Christian.”

— Jia Tolentino

14. “The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.”

— Jia Tolentino

15. “There’s a joke that’s circulated for the past few years: leftists say abolish prisons, liberals say hire more women guards. Now plenty of conservatives, having clocked feminism’s palatability, say hire more women guards, too.”

— Jia Tolentino

16. “There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”

— Jia Tolentino

17. “To use Amazon – which I did regularly for years with full knowledge of its labor practices – is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible; even, and maybe particularly, people.”

— Jia Tolentino

18. “I wish I had known – then, in Peace Corps, or in college – that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.”

— Jia Tolentino

19. “To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal “the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he knows, or has known, that he will not be able to tell himself.” The interviewee, for example, avoids thinking about the fact that his biggest flaw actually involves drinking at the office.”

— Jia Tolentino

20. “In 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote, in ‘Beauty Myth,’ about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased. It’s as if our culture has mustered an immune system response to continue breaking the fever of gender equality – as if some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty to makeup for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men.”

— Jia Tolentino

21. “The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact, or strengthened, by draining women’s energy and wasting our time.”

— Jia Tolentino

22. “It occurs to me that I crave independence, that I demand and expect it, but never enough, since I was a teenager, to actually be alone.”

— Jia Tolentino

23. “A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine.”

— Jia Tolentino

24. “As with all optimization experiences and products, athleisure is reliably comfortable and supportive in a world that is not.”

— Jia Tolentino

25. “Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them. A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is usually a dubious one:.”

— Jia Tolentino

26. “We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever – you cannot live in a house like this anymore.”

— Jia Tolentino

27. “It was the first time that I fully understood myself to be subsumed within a social system that was unjust, brutal, punitive – that women were suffering because men had dominion over them, that men were suffering because they were expected to perform this dominion, that power had been stacked so unevenly, so long ago, that there was very little I could do.”

— Jia Tolentino

28. “Something had happened, and she wanted to tell other people, so that they would know what happened and how she felt. But when she tried to tell it – maybe to somebody else, maybe to herself – the story had no power. It didn’t sound, in the telling, anything like what it felt like in the living. It sounded ordinary, mundane, eminently forgettable, like a million things that had happened to a million other women – but that wasn’t what it felt like to her.”

— Jia Tolentino

29. “I was shocked at first by how intrusive all of this was, but then again, Seraphina had always come off mildly impervious; she had this carelessness that allowed her to do things that I would’ve berated myself for in the shower for years.”

— Jia Tolentino

30. “I wonder, sometimes, if I have continued to do drugs because they make me feel the way I did when I was little, an uncomplicated creation, vulnerable to guilt and benevolence.”

— Jia Tolentino

31. “When I feel confused about something, I write about it until I turn into the person who shows up on paper: a person who is plausibly trustworthy, intuitive, and clear. It’s exactly this habit – or compulsion – that makes me suspect that I am fooling myself. If I were, in fact, the calm person who shows up on paper, why would I always need to hammer out a narrative that gets me there?”

— Jia Tolentino

32. “Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation.”

— Jia Tolentino

33. “Resistance to a system is almost always presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to use it to adapt rather than to oppose.”

— Jia Tolentino

34. “In doing this, I have sometimes felt the same sort of unease that washed over me when I was a cheerleader and learned how to convincingly fake happiness at football games – the feeling of acting as if conditions are fun and normal and worthwhile in the hopes that they will just magically become so.”

— Jia Tolentino

35. “I have become acutely conscious of the way my brain degrades when I strap it in to receive the full barrage of the internet – these unlimited channels, all constantly reloading with new information: births, deaths, boasts, bombings, jokes, job announcements, ads, warnings, complaints, confessions, and political disasters blitzing our frayed neurons in huge waves of information that pummel us and then are instantly replaced. This is an awful way to live, and it is wearing us down quickly.”

— Jia Tolentino

36. “Figuring out how to ‘get better’ at being a woman is ridiculous and often amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.”

— Jia Tolentino

37. “These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image. She can believe – reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism – that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant and often pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her money, her decisions, her selfhood and her soul.”

— Jia Tolentino

38. “I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional – to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.”

— Jia Tolentino

39. “It’s a “profoundly tricky spiritual fact,” Carson writes. “I cannot go toward God in love without bringing myself along.” Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate this desire to vanish is always to reiterate the self once again. Greener, not paler.”

— Jia Tolentino

40. “We would have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the internet, and how much we’re giving it in return. We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us, to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without putting ourselves first.”

— Jia Tolentino

41. “We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay way too much.”

— Jia Tolentino

42. “People wrote about women ‘speaking out’ with prayerful reverence, as if speech itself could bring women freedom – as if better policies and economic redistribution and true investment from men weren’t necessary, too.”

— Jia Tolentino

43. “It’s hard to draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose an aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in.”

— Jia Tolentino

44. “To argue against an ideology, you have to acknowledge and articulate it. In the process, you might inadvertently ventriloquize your opposition. This is a problem that kneecaps me constantly, a problem that might define journalism in the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time.”

— Jia Tolentino

45. “To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion.”

— Jia Tolentino

46. “At a basic level, Facebook, like most other forms of social media, runs on doublespeak: advertising connection but creating isolation; promising happiness but inculcating dread.”

— Jia Tolentino

47. “Prescriptions about female behavior, Solnit notes, are often disingenuously expressed in terms of happiness – as if we really want women to be beautiful, selfless, hardworking wives and mothers because that’s what will make them happy, when models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women.”

— Jia Tolentino

48. “The reframing of female difficulty as an asset rather than a liability is the result of decades and decades of feminist thought coming to bear – suddenly, floridly, and very persuasively – in the open ideological space of the internet.”

— Jia Tolentino

49. “Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality. And this choice, combined with the company’s financial incentive to continually trigger heightened emotional responses in its users, ultimately solidified the current norm in news media consumption: today we mostly consume news that corresponds with our ideological alignment, which has been fine-tuned to make us feel self-righteous and also mad.”

— Jia Tolentino

50. “I sat dead eyed in the pool house, wondering if I was in fact wrong about everything, if visibility was actually just like money, where if you had enough of it there was a threshold of security below which you would never really fall.”

— Jia Tolentino