Top 60 Lynda Barry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible BE the unexpected.”

— Lynda Barry

2. “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.”

— Lynda Barry

3. “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.”

— Lynda Barry

4. “This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.”

— Lynda Barry

5. “Always watch the hands. The hands will tell you everything you need to know.”

— Lynda Barry

6. “If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.”

— Lynda Barry

7. “Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a beer bottle while somebody tells you about a dream they had.”

— Lynda Barry

8. “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to god and my country but it might not be the same god as the god of the church and I might not be digging on the message of the president because the windmills of his mind are cracked on a lot of subjects concerning people.”

— Lynda Barry

9. “You can’t know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we’re reading or writing.”

— Lynda Barry

Featured in: Reading Quotes

10. “When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.”

— Lynda Barry

11. “But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?”

— Lynda Barry

12. “Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.”

— Lynda Barry

13. “In health we’re doing the digestive system. We each got assigned a topic for an oral report. I got the small intestine. I swear to god I hate my life.”

— Lynda Barry

14. “Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.”

— Lynda Barry

15. “You’ll never call him Fifi again.”

— Lynda Barry

16. “As I enter the small intestine I get squeezed by muscles. Its dark and the walls look like slimey crushed velvet theres pancreas juice on me help me I am disintigrating.”

— Lynda Barry

17. “Love will make a way out of no way.”

— Lynda Barry

18. “The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it’s an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn’t notice you noticed at all.”

— Lynda Barry

19. “The histories of vampires and people are not so different, really. How many of us can honestly see our own reflection?”

— Lynda Barry

20. “These are very confusing times. For the first time in history a woman is expected to combine: intelligence with a sharp hairdo, a raised consciousness with high heels, and an open, nonsexist relationship with a tan guy who has a great bod.”

— Lynda Barry

21. “The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad its there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isnt dead.”

— Lynda Barry

22. “At the center of everything we call ‘the arts,’ and children call ‘play,’ is something which seems somehow alive.”

— Lynda Barry

23. “Race and class are the easiest divisions. It’s very stupid.”

— Lynda Barry

24. “If I could only turn the etch-a-sketch of my life upside down.”

— Lynda Barry

25. “You have to be willing to spend time making things for no known reason.”

— Lynda Barry

26. “I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.”

— Lynda Barry

27. “The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.”

— Lynda Barry

28. “Cartoonist was the weirdest name I finally let myself have. I would never say it. When I heard it I silently thought, what an awful word.”

— Lynda Barry

29. “Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.”

— Lynda Barry

30. “Some lights shine without any flashing. Others flash on and off.”

— Lynda Barry

31. “Maybonne said “Just because someone has lace-up hip huggers does not mean they can control the world”. Then Magreet let her wear those pants. When my aunt saw them on her she shouted “Are you trying to kill me?!”

— Lynda Barry

32. “Mr. Harmong is the cheapest chintziest most pig-lipped tightwad skanked-out lardo king landlord of all time.”

— Lynda Barry

33. “When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?”

— Lynda Barry

34. “The minute you understand racism, you’re responsible for being racist. It’s like eating from the tree of knowledge.”

— Lynda Barry

35. “Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!”

— Lynda Barry

36. “I am hell with a knife and there is nothing I can really do about it but try and keep my mouth shut and try not to let it show.”

— Lynda Barry

37. “Flies die in so many lonely places. -Roberta Rohbeson.”

— Lynda Barry

38. “You know that great car-stomach feeling when you fly over a hump? That was my whole body.”

— Lynda Barry

39. “My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie.”

— Lynda Barry

40. “In life there are always these things happening if you can just get the joke.”

— Lynda Barry

41. “I listen like mad to any conversation taking place next to me just trying to hear why this is funny. Women’s restrooms are especially great. I wash my hands twice waiting for people to come in and start talking.”

— Lynda Barry

42. “I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.”

— Lynda Barry

Featured in: Reading Quotes

43. “When you think about it, giving up your real personality is a small price to pay for the richness of living happily ever after with an actual man!”

— Lynda Barry

44. “Dear Blubbo, How is it going? It is fine here. My sisters are fine. Mom is usual. Everything is regular in life except I am still seeing the burning skull heads. Yesterday Mom took me to Sears for school clothes. I told my sisters I could see the people’s head bones. They said DO NOT tell Mom. A guy moved a trailer onto the empty lot by our house. His skull is spectacular, many colors glowing.”

— Lynda Barry

45. “You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you’re not. That’d be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the ‘hello’ is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?”

— Lynda Barry

46. “There was a beautiful time in the beginning when I just did it and didn’t analyze the consequences, but I think that time ends in everyone’s work.”

— Lynda Barry

47. “It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me.”

— Lynda Barry

48. “I go to work the minute I open my eyes.”

— Lynda Barry

49. “I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble. As much trouble as you could imagine.”

— Lynda Barry

50. “I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.”

— Lynda Barry