Top 200 Lena Dunham Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I kind of look like every other girl walking around.”

— Lena Dunham

202. “There are two types of women in particular who inspire my envy. The first is an ebullient one, happily engaged from morning until night, able to enjoy things like group lunches, spontaneous vacations to Cartagena with gangs of girlfriends, and planning other people’s baby showers. The bigger existential questions don’t seem to plague her, and she can clean her stove without ever once thinking, What’s the point? It just gets dirty again anyway and then we die. Why don’t I just stick my head...”

— Lena Dunham

203. “There is something vulnerable about showing your tattoos to people, even while it gives you a feeling that you are wearing a sleeve when you are naked.”

— Lena Dunham

204. “There’s people who don’t want to see bodies like mine or bodies like their own bodies.”

— Lena Dunham

205. “That being said, it’s horrible when people you hate get things you want.”

— Lena Dunham

206. “No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew: about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life.”

— Lena Dunham

207. “I felt highly anxious in a way that I didn’t think other children were.”

— Lena Dunham

208. “Over time, my belief in many things has wavered: marriage, the afterlife, Woody Allen.”

— Lena Dunham

209. “My parents were very supportive when I was growing up and have been all the way through.”

— Lena Dunham

210. “She asks me my worst quality, and I say I can be very self-involved. She says hers is that she gets lost in the world of her work and can’t find her way back out again.”

— Lena Dunham

211. “It’s almost like when you’re young, your friends take on the romance role, and then guys take on the role of your friends later.”

— Lena Dunham

212. “I feel like you don’t know if someone’s equipped for a romantic relationship until they’re out of their twenties.”

— Lena Dunham

213. “I have never been a physically engaged person. Like, I was not an athletic kid. I was the kid who came up with a thousand excuses not to take a gym class. Even now, if I could, I would do all my work from bed.”

— Lena Dunham

214. “But I am not one of those young people. I’ve been obsessed with death since I was born.”

— Lena Dunham

215. “A month into the semester, I would start showing up twenty minutes late to class again. The rewards weren’t enough to keep me on task, and life got in the way. My mind wandered to the future, postcollege, when I’d create my own schedule that served my need to eat a rich snack every five to fifteen minutes. As for the disappointment written across the teacher’s face? I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, care.”

— Lena Dunham

216. “I’m not great at dating, but I need to do it to relax.”

— Lena Dunham

217. “I’ve always been someone who feels better, if I see what I’m going through in a movie.”

— Lena Dunham

218. “I’ve only recently realized that I have a radically different relationship with my parents than a lot of people.”

— Lena Dunham

219. “D. J. Tanner called and she wants her wardrobe back so it can be included in a museum retrospective about the prime years of Full House.”

— Lena Dunham

220. “If we follow the Buddhist logic that we are becoming part of glory of the universe, one huge consciousness, well, that’s just too much togetherness for my taste. I couldn’t even do a group art project in second grade. How am I going to share understanding with the rest of the creation? If this proves to be the case, I’m too much of a loner for death, but I’m also scared of being lonely. Where does that leave me?”

— Lena Dunham

221. “Upon graduation I had felt a heavy sense of doom, a sense that nothing would ever be simple again. But look, look what we had found! We were making it work, with our cash and our bad wrapping jobs, with our fried overdyed hair and our fried overprocessed foods. Everything took on a hazy romance: having a pimple, eating a doughnut, being cold. Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke.”

— Lena Dunham

222. “If a young woman is looking at the landscape of Hollywood, what she sees is almost only challenges.”

— Lena Dunham

223. “But occasionally the feeling stays with me, and it reminds me of being a child – feeling full of fear but lacking the language to calm yourself down. I guess, when it comes to death, none of us really has the words.”

— Lena Dunham

224. “I thought I was really a radical, political person, which of course I am not.”

— Lena Dunham

225. “When we, as young women, are given the space to read, the act becomes a happy, private corner we can return to for the rest of our lives. We develop this love of reading by turning to stories that speak to the most special, secret parts of us.”

— Lena Dunham

226. “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.”

— Lena Dunham

227. “Running had always been off the table for me. It just looks embarrassing when I do it. I viewed it like learning a new language – best to learn it as a child.”

— Lena Dunham

228. “This is a reference to when I told him that, as a child, I was hypnotized by my own beauty. This was the time in life before I learned it wasn’t considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself.”

— Lena Dunham

229. “You know, I always think of myself as sort of ready for every criticism.”

— Lena Dunham

230. “I seriously consider television to be the people’s medium.”

— Lena Dunham

231. “I just hope that I continue to keep a line between my private life and who I play, even if they are closely intertwined, and so I’m careful. I don’t even know where my line is, but I know I have a line.”

— Lena Dunham

232. “I have to remind myself that when you exercise, there is a natural calm that comes from knowing that you did something with your body that day. Actually going and working out makes everything else easier and better.”

— Lena Dunham

233. “I am not a particularly political person, but, as a Tribeca resident, the commodification of September 11th is offensive to me.”

— Lena Dunham

234. “I couldn’t always remember his face, so my visual for him became my feet, bare and pale and pressed against the wall as we talked for hours.”

— Lena Dunham

235. “I love what I do, I love every minute of it.”

— Lena Dunham

236. “I sort of tend to equate tattoos with prisoners, punks or people with a high level of self-confidence. I don’t necessarily have a covered-in-tattoos personality.”

— Lena Dunham

237. “Finally, one day, I couldn’t stand it anymore: I walked into the kitchen, laid my head on the table, and asked my father, “How are we supposed to live every day if we know we’re going to die?” He looked at me, clearly pained by the dawning of my genetically predestined morbidity. He had been the same way as a kid. A day never went by where he didn’t think about his eventual demise. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, unable to conjure a comforting answer. “You just do.”

— Lena Dunham

238. “Intrigued as I was by this new dynamic of disrespect, at my core I didn’t want to be spoken to like that. 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

239. “I think a fair amount about the fact that we’re all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments – I’ll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I’ll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I’ll think: Are these people aware that we’re all going to the same place in the end?”

— Lena Dunham

240. “Menstruating is the only part of being female I have ever disliked. Everything else feels like a unique and covetable privilege, but this?”

— Lena Dunham