Top 70 Raven Leilani Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Imagine living life so carefully that there are no signs you lived at all.”

— Raven Leilani

2. “I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.”

— Raven Leilani

3. “I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”

— Raven Leilani

4. “I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.”

— Raven Leilani

5. “Because she is thirteen, and I remember how it felt from the inside. I remember what I thought I knew about people, and the pride I took in being alone. But from the outside, the loneliness is palpable, and I think, she is too young.”

— Raven Leilani

6. “She is, I suppose, sexy in the way a triangle can be sexy, the clean pivot from point A to B to C, her body and face breaking no rules, following each other in a way that is logical and curt.”

— Raven Leilani

7. “During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice. I was not popular and I was not unpopular. To invite admiration or ridicule, you first have to be seen.”

— Raven Leilani

8. “When my father was a soldier, his prefrontal cortex wasn’t yet complete. He could not grow a full mustache, and when he came back home he had a cane and a DIY tattoo of a woman’s name.”

— Raven Leilani

9. “A month is too long to talk online. In the time we have been talking, my imagination has run wild. Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.”

— Raven Leilani

10. “All this time Eric hasn’t looked away from me, within his confusion a promise of retribution that I find thrilling – historically the sort of high sweetest at its inception, when a man’s wrath is just a consideration, when he curtails the impulse because he thinks he’s different while you know he is the same.”

— Raven Leilani

11. “When she is undressed, I still feel the old impulse to compare, but otherwise her body is like a dagger, like the body of a woman who is in the business of sending off the dead. And this is how she holds herself, like a person uninterested by her own anatomical drama, her bearing unselfconscious, indifferent. It feels like a challenge.”

— Raven Leilani

12. “And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.”

— Raven Leilani

13. “I think of how keenly I’ve been wrong. I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”

— Raven Leilani

14. “And things come up. One of us gets sick, I can’t muster enough will to open my mail or wash my hair, he has a business trip or a dinner party with Rebecca, and by the time we meet again, we have forgotten how we fit. We are in a state of constant regression, distance rendering the details too slippery to grasp.”

— Raven Leilani

15. “And she will be. Because it is an art – to be black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.”

— Raven Leilani

16. “Ce n’est pas que je veux de la compagnie, mais j’ai envie que d’autres yeux attestent de mon existence.”

— Raven Leilani

17. “In a way, that makes my dreams delirious expressions of thirst – long stretches of yellow desert, cathedrals hemmed in dripping moss.”

— Raven Leilani

18. “He wants me to be myself like a leopard might be herself in a city zoo. Inert, waiting to be fed. Not out in the wild, with tendon in her teeth.”

— Raven Leilani

19. “In my few years of dating, I have received a number of gifts from men. Gifts that were bought in haste at duty-free, that were fattening or detrimental to vaginal pH, that overestimated my interest in Lyndon B. Johnson and the New York Mets.”

— Raven Leilani

20. “Arguably it would be hard to be bad at it, but if a person comes to rote work with the expectation that she will be demeaned, she can bypass the pitfalls of hope and redirect all that energy into being a merciless drone.”

— Raven Leilani

21. “It’s a death rattle, she says, directing me to the lawn mower and adjusting the string on the mask, the grass communicating its distress, and for the rest of the day I think of that, sick to my stomach, the lawn buzzed and alkaline, the vinegar in the wine and carnage in the dew, everywhere the perfume of things that want to live.”

— Raven Leilani

22. “I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible.”

— Raven Leilani

23. “We were bonded in our mutual hatred of our bodies, though my hatred was adolescent and hers was infinitely more developed, partly a trick of her newly sober brain, which found in food a substitute for the narcotics that had kept her lean. By the time she killed herself, she would still be eleven pounds shy of her goal.”

— Raven Leilani

24. “He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.”

— Raven Leilani

25. “Interesting,’ I say. Of course, it is not interesting that he has been allowed to live candidly. It is not interesting that he cannot conceive of anything else. He has equated his range of motion with mine. He hasn’t considered the lies you tell to survive, the kindness of pretend, which I illustrate now, as I eat this bacterial hot dog. This is the first time I sort of understand him. He thinks we’re alike. He has no idea how hard I’m trying.”

— Raven Leilani

26. “He follows me on Instagram and leaves lengthy comments on my posts. Retired internet slang interspersed with earnest remarks about how the light falls on my face. Compared to the inscrutable advances of younger men, it is a relief.”

— Raven Leilani

27. “Because in the moments we are closest, there is always a caveat, always a clock running out, and nothing can be purely sweet. I wake up in the morning and think for a moment that I am someone happier and then I remember where I am.”

— Raven Leilani

28. “Because in an hour, a man without a brain will be a man who looks like he can dream.”

— Raven Leilani

29. “I felt my power in the high, desperate sound of his pleasure. I felt my error in how little I thought it would mean. I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.”

— Raven Leilani

30. “I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it.”

— Raven Leilani

31. “All I want is for him to have what he wants. I want to be uncomplicated and undemanding. I want no friction between his fantasy and the person I actually am. I want all that and I want none of it.”

— Raven Leilani

32. “Trinidadian men do not just have eyelashes for days, they have something more subliminal that does not make itself known to you until it is nuclear and you are stuck with eleven kids in Jamaica, Queens, while he is tickling ivories for a traveling circus.”

— Raven Leilani

33. “My love, this is the problem with your generation. Instant gratification,” he says, and because it took him, on average, forty-three minutes to come, because I put on the ears and the tail and learned the lyrics to “Painting the Roses Red” backward and forward, because I drank approximately five gallons of cranberry juice over the course of our relationship, and for a day or two required the use of a cane, I take issue with his definition of instant.”

— Raven Leilani

34. “No one wants what no one wants.”

— Raven Leilani

35. “I feel bad that my first instinct is to manage his feelings, instead of suggesting somewhere else to go. That we will both have to endure my attempt to prove over the course of this date that I am Having a Good Time! and that This Is Not Your Fault!”

— Raven Leilani

36. “Even if I have done the adequate mental jujitsu to convince myself that I appear like a normal human being, a trip to the bathroom to regroup can on occasion turn into the kind of fun-house voodoo that happens in DMV photos and long exposures of Victorian children. There is something about looking into someone else’s mirror, something that always gives me more information than I need.”

— Raven Leilani

37. “There is nothing I can do to level the playing field. Some men at least have the decency to guide you immediately to all the things that are wrong with them. But everything I’ve seen of Eric, I want to see again.”

— Raven Leilani

38. “I think I see Eric on the other side of the room but it is just a lamp.”

— Raven Leilani

39. “I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible. I made mistakes with these men. I dove for their legs as they tried to leave my house. I chased them down the hall with a bottle of Listerine, saying, I can be a beach read, I can get rid of all these clauses, please, I’ll just revise.”

— Raven Leilani

40. “As a rule, I try to avoid popping that dusky cherry. I cannot be the first black girl a white man dates. I cannot endure the nervous renditions of backpacker rap, the conspicuous effort to be colloquial, or the smugness of pink men in kente cloth.”

— Raven Leilani

41. “Because there are men who are an answer to a biological imperative, whom I chew and swallow, and there are men I hold in my mouth until they dissolve.”

— Raven Leilani

42. “I feel boring for the compulsion to compare myself to her, and even a little mean, but her serenity bothers me. It bothers me that she doesn’t wear prettier underwear, that her marriage is inscrutable and involved, and that I am somewhere inside it.”

— Raven Leilani

43. “I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born to die.”

— Raven Leilani

44. “If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.”

— Raven Leilani

45. “Because I have to be honest, I’m having trouble reading you, and I’m usually great at that kind of thing.” I finish my beer and try not to show how overjoyed I am that none of my need and loathing have come across. “You’re kind of aloof,” he says, and all the kids stacked underneath my trench coat rejoice. Aloof is a casual lean, is a choice. It is not a girl in Bushwick, licking clean a can of tuna.”

— Raven Leilani

46. “During my interview with CVS, I try to be convincing in my assurance that pointing young adults in the direction of Plan B has always been part of my 5 year plan. But after the interview, I go to the parking lot to drink some cough syrup and notice one of the managers watching me from his car.”

— Raven Leilani

47. “It gets us loose enough to talk about politics, but as he talks, I hold my breath. I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial ideological points – women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years – but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.”

— Raven Leilani

48. “I want to say that I am not that kind of girl. Portable, contorting herself over an inaccessible, possibly disinterested man, but what if I am? There are worse things – factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean. Because maybe I don’t want to be cool. Maybe I want to be all-purpose. Maybe I can’t pretend to be aloof to men who are aloof to me.”

— Raven Leilani

49. “So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.”

— Raven Leilani

50. “I put on a complex pair of underwear that is not so much underwear as a bundle of string, and I stand before the mirror. I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.”

— Raven Leilani