Top 200 Lena Dunham Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I should do the things that make me feel cool and smart. As I get older, I’m realizing more and more that it doesn’t really matter if I’m good at it, it just matters that I try. My own effort, my own willingness, are becoming what’s appealing to me.”

— Lena Dunham

102. “It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.”

— Lena Dunham

103. “I didn’t drink in the essence of the classroom. I didn’t take legible notes or dance all night. I thought I would marry my boyfriend and grow old and sick of him. I thought I would keep my friends, and we’d make different, new memories. None of that happened. Better things happened.”

— Lena Dunham

104. “On a personal level, I’m proud of Grace Dunham for being so staunchly in her identity. It’s a very unusual thing for a young person. I think she’s been very strong about it.”

— Lena Dunham

105. “I’ve never wanted to be with women so much as I wanted to be them: there are women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has bee simultaneously hostile and rapt.”

— Lena Dunham

106. “I’ve been a little haphazard about how nude I get, and the only thing that keeps me from getting anxious about it is that I’ve had complete control over it.”

— Lena Dunham

107. “You can’t give any exciting speech without misremembering things.”

— Lena Dunham

108. “I have to take my shoes off, you guys.”

— Lena Dunham

109. “Let this book take you to the stars and beyond.”

— Lena Dunham

110. “I’m not super thin, but I’m thin, for like, Detroit.”

— Lena Dunham

111. “I always thought that if you had any real proximity to famous people, that your obsession with famous people, would wane is some way. Like, I wouldn’t want to deep google Matthew McConaughey’s early relationships for hours before I go to bed. And it’s just gotten worse.”

— Lena Dunham

112. “I didn’t have to wait six years to get my show on the air, worry that someone else had a similar idea, or wait around for notes that took my voice out of the show.”

— Lena Dunham

113. “I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.”

— Lena Dunham

114. “I mean, I – it’s so funny, I am, you know, I am, you know, a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I’ve been sort of taking this very long, stuttering period of moving out.”

— Lena Dunham

115. “I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.”

— Lena Dunham

116. “She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions.”

— Lena Dunham

117. “Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called “How To Disappear and Never Be Found?” You’re sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply to his work, but it raised the distinct possibility that there is something very upsetting that people you love could do instead of dying.”

— Lena Dunham

118. “If you watch my movie, you understand I am perverse and weird and angry and not looking to direct a film that ends with a bunch of teenagers exploding into glitter.”

— Lena Dunham

119. “When she writes, which isn’t often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.”

— Lena Dunham

120. “Hugs feel good even when they come from strangers. Ergo, we should all be hugging more.”

— Lena Dunham

121. “Later in the summer your grandfather dies, and you’re secretly glad. You have a place to put all your sorrow now, one that people will understand.”

— Lena Dunham

122. “I think about death, when I lie in bed and imagine disintegrating, my skin going leathery and my hair petrifying and a tree growing out of my stomach, it’s a way to avoid what’s right in front of me. It’s a way to not be here, in the uncertainty of right now.”

— Lena Dunham

123. “I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up there is one blissful second before I took around the room and remember my daily terrors.”

— Lena Dunham

124. “For me, my life goal is to be in a position where I can wear pajamas 24 hours a day. That’s what makes me happy.”

— Lena Dunham

125. “It would probably be too easy a cop out to say that just Republican males hate me. Though there’s a large swath of them, for sure.”

— Lena Dunham

126. “I do think girls in their twenties accept certain kinds of lesser treatment than they would at other times in their lives.”

— Lena Dunham

127. “The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form... I didn’t know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do.”

— Lena Dunham

128. “I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn’t really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.”

— Lena Dunham

129. “There’s always an article coming out, saying, ‘The new thing is funny women!’”

— Lena Dunham

130. “Soon you will find yourself in more and more situations you don’t want to run from. At work you’ll realize that you’ve spent the entire day in your body, really in it, not imagining what you look like to the people who surround you but just being who you are. You are a tool being put to its proper use. That changes a lot of things.”

— Lena Dunham

131. “I think breakfast is the one meal when you don’t have to eat animal, maybe.”

— Lena Dunham

132. “Throughout the day I often ask myself, Could I fall asleep right now? and the answer is always a resounding yes.”

— Lena Dunham

133. “I went to schools that were small enough that basically everyone was in a play. I played a bouncing ball in a production of Alice in Wonderland and a fat man in an Italian commedia dell’arte play. I was given some small chances.”

— Lena Dunham

134. “The work that’s interesting to me in other people is really confessional.”

— Lena Dunham

135. “But surveying those words I realized they are mine. He is mine to protect. There is so much I’ve shared, and so much that’s been crushed by the sharing. I never mourned it, because it never mattered.”

— Lena Dunham

136. “It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.”

— Lena Dunham

137. “Why spend $200 once a week on therapy when you can spend $150 once a year on a psychic?”

— Lena Dunham

138. “I quit acting when I was 11 because I was cast as a bouncing ball in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ and I felt slighted and wounded.”

— Lena Dunham

139. “My mom knows pretty well how I see her.”

— Lena Dunham

140. “A friend once told me that when you’ve been in AA, drinking is never fun again. And that’s how I feel about having seen a nutritionist – I will never again approach food in an unbridled, guilt-free way.”

— Lena Dunham

141. “If you’re writing, you’re starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it’s for other people – that comes in later.”

— Lena Dunham

142. “I was reminded again that there are so many things we need that can also hurt us: cars, knives, grown-ups.”

— Lena Dunham

143. “I’m always having to be told to brush my hair.”

— Lena Dunham

144. “After all, desire is the enemy of contentment.”

— Lena Dunham

145. “I love flawed female characters, duking it out.”

— Lena Dunham

146. “Even when presented with evidence of my own productivity I think that the people accusing me of being productive don’t know how hard it is for me to just bend my elbow sometimes.”

— Lena Dunham

147. “I started writing plays, but the fact that plays don’t last forever was too much for me to bear.”

— Lena Dunham

148. “Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane.”

— Lena Dunham

149. “My dad finds Twitter just infinitely unrelatable. He’s like, ‘Why would I want to tell anybody what I had for a snack, it’s private?!’ And I’m like, ‘Why would you even have a snack if you didn’t tell anybody? Why bother eating?’”

— Lena Dunham

150. “What a goon. He’s lucky to know you, but too stupid to ever realize it.”

— Lena Dunham