Top 70 Samantha Irby Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “This is just how I am. IM FINE. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this undercurrent of sadness that, if I’m being honest, I don’t totally mind. It was easy to ignore because it doesn’t bother me that much. And I don’t want to be some shiny, happy idiot. This is gritty, this is real.”

— Samantha Irby

2. “Hello, 911? I put on my jacket and got in my own car and braved the icy parking lot and picked up my own food: AM I SUPPOSED TO TIP?”

— Samantha Irby

3. “Being perceived is excruciating, especially if you can’t go person to person explaining why you look like that. I’d go to a lot more stuff if I knew I could take each person aside and explain to them why I look and dress the way I do.”

— Samantha Irby

4. “Showing up at a restaurant and hoping for the best is a young person’s game. If I’m going out, I need to know that there is a table with my name on it and a comfortable seat pulled up to it. I’m too old to hover anxiously near the door, sweating under my coat in my good outside clothes, watching people who actually planned ahead be ushered to their awaiting tables and served the foods I am dying to eat.”

— Samantha Irby

5. “Sadly, life is not a movie. Life is an impossibly long and unyielding march to the grave, peppered along the way with myriad disappointments and misfortunes.”

— Samantha Irby

6. “He’s not a bus – stop waiting for him. Catch the next one!”

— Samantha Irby

7. “Living in Chicago spoils you, because there are hundreds of places fifteen minutes from wherever you happen to be at any given moment where you can find locally sourced farm-to-table organic meals made by a chef who’s probably been on TV.”

— Samantha Irby

8. “You know, what I really need is someone who remembers to rotate this meaty pre-corpse toward the sun every couple of days and tries to get me to stop spending my money like a goddamn NBA lottery pick.”

— Samantha Irby

9. “It’s extremely hard to motivate myself to get to a place where I’m required to pay a twenty-dollar cover to get hip-checked by linebackers in church shoes all night, especially when I could just get back in my warm bed and NOT DO THAT.”

— Samantha Irby

10. “I just don’t want to do that anymore. Can’t we just lie fully clothed in bed together while holding hands and talking about how good pork belly tacos taste? I don’t want to do the “I’m sorry this is my disgusting body” apology jig ever again, nor will there ever be a time that the “just let me keep my shirt on” waltz isn’t utterly humiliating. Why must they always argue? Just let me keep this stupid long-sleeved shirt on already.”

— Samantha Irby

11. “I’m not bitter, I survived a liar. I’m not bitter, I weathered a cheater. I’m not bitter, I sustained a massive injury to the giant, bloody muscle in the center of my chest that is responsible for pumping blood through my entire body.”

— Samantha Irby

12. “I learned how to operate under both the physical and emotional weight of unrelenting shame very early. Fat babies are adorable, while fat children are a little less so. Fat teenagers are chided into either end of the eating-disorder spectrum, and fat adults are either admonished for not figuring out how to get new bodies during adolescence or straight up dismissed altogether.”

— Samantha Irby

13. “Maybe in this life you get all kinds of soulmates, multiple people who vibrate at the same level you do.”

— Samantha Irby

14. “Having grown up in this liberal North Shore enclave where no one blinks an eye at your Liberal Gay Blackness, I sometimes forget that the minute you jump on 355 heading west, Illinois becomes an entirely different place. A place where mullets are still fashionable and fanny packs are considered an acceptable accessory.”

— Samantha Irby

15. “I don’t know what an attractive personality is. I like charisma and charm, but what I really need to find is someone who doesn’t get on my nerves but is also minimally annoyed by all the irritating things about me.”

— Samantha Irby

16. “Never again will I be with someone who is unwilling to accept me as I am, or who has any desire to mold me into something that makes me uncomfortable.”

— Samantha Irby

17. “I approach most endeavors with zero expectations, which is a skill I have honed after forty years of fairly regular disappointment.”

— Samantha Irby

18. “What have you not found but would like to have in a relationship? Someone who will leave me the hell alone for extended periods of time without getting all weird about it. I have a lot of audiobooks to listen to on the toilet.”

— Samantha Irby

19. “Convenience is the number one driver of everything I do.”

— Samantha Irby

20. “I am a negative person by nature, and I typically shy away from anything that requires me to be having visible fun.”

— Samantha Irby

21. “Carnivore in the streets, person-who-has-eaten-a-carrot-masquerading-as-a-hot-dog in the sheets.”

— Samantha Irby

22. “Back when I had feelings, my self-esteem was a toilet. It caused me actual physical pain to know that someone didn’t like me. I mean, it still does, but I’m better insulated by drugs these days.”

— Samantha Irby

23. “Everyone thinks I’m going to eventually die of a heart attack, but joke’s on y’all – it’s definitely going to be of secondhand embarrassment.”

— Samantha Irby

24. “I do not knock on Fiona’s door when I’m trying to have an upbeat good time; I am coming to her with the shattered pieces of my heart in my hands, setting the pointy shards at her feet, and lying very still until she stomps on them with her words.”

— Samantha Irby

25. “I like to sit at home in mild terror as the world rages outside without me, hoping that no one is going to drop by and expect me to come up with a humorous anecdote or ask me to have an opinion on something.”

— Samantha Irby

26. “Hello, 911? I’ve been lying awake for an hour each night, reliving a two-second awkward experience I had in front of a casual acquaintance three years ago, for eight months.”

— Samantha Irby

27. “I really wish I was the type of person who owned a Prius and didn’t work fifty hours a week and could spend time in the grocery store reading labels to make sure that there isn’t a drop of gelatin or honey in every single thing I put in my cart at Whole Foods.”

— Samantha Irby

28. “I just want to go down to the bar, listen to three beers’ worth of your problems, then claim that my stomach hurts so I can leave and get in bed before nine.”

— Samantha Irby

29. “When you’re a kid it’s sometimes just easier to go along with other people’s definitions of who you are.”

— Samantha Irby

30. “Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, “Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and I got you some while I was out,” as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table.”

— Samantha Irby

31. “Favorite food? Brunch and tacos.”

— Samantha Irby

32. “So I did the next best thing: I unbuttoned my pants and decided to take a driving tour of the western suburbs. And that, my little pumpkins, is how a dude in a dress and a runaway slave happened upon Civil War Days.”

— Samantha Irby

33. “Leading people on is a hate crime. Especially when you could just say what you want and let them decide whether or not they want to give it to you without getting their romantic feelings involved.”

— Samantha Irby

34. “Hello, 911? Why did this woman choose the middle stall in this three-stall public bathroom?”

— Samantha Irby

35. “Like every other poor kid with sick or addicted parents, I knew that I needed to make myself small, that my problems should remain my problems only.”

— Samantha Irby

36. “But no, I came by these feelings honestly. And I don’t accept bitter. Wounded, yes. Traumatized, sure. Grieving, okay. Anything other than bitter. I put too much work in to be callously tossed aside as bitter. Bitter is for someone who hasn’t earned it.”

— Samantha Irby

37. “My head hurts, so I either have a brain tumor or I haven’t had enough caffeine today.”

— Samantha Irby

38. “The Bachelorette proves that men are as petty and vapid and ridiculous as women are made to seem. They’re just better at hiding it, because they get to be Real Men and sulk and brood and bottle everything up.”

— Samantha Irby

39. “Itell anyone who is interested that my ideal long-term romantic relationship is one in which my manfriend and I have separate apartments in the same building. Or in buildings across the street from one another.”

— Samantha Irby

40. “No one ever tells attractive children how much they suck, and then the rest of us get stuck with insufferable, narcissistic adults who can barely tie their shoes because someone else is busy either doing it for them or congratulating them on their effort. I do not have the energy to be in a relationship with someone exceptionally good-looking.”

— Samantha Irby

41. “A handy trick is to think long and hard about what the person who hates you would realistically add to your life if they were to actually be a part of it. Most people really do have absolutely nothing to offer you.”

— Samantha Irby

42. “Why has age made me better at so few things?”

— Samantha Irby

43. “Words like “outdoor music festival” are why I am so glad summer in Chicago lasts approximately seven minutes.”

— Samantha Irby

44. “Hello, 911? My friend just left me a voice mail.”

— Samantha Irby

45. “But, reasonable though it may have been, that talk had left me touchy and defensive, so I let his e-mails and texts go unanswered while I licked my “never gonna spend the morning cuddled at the Hyde Park library together” wounds.”

— Samantha Irby

46. “Don’t you wish you’d had a kid?” Do I wish I could stand idly by and witness all the things I hate about myself manifested in, and mirrored back to me by, a person it’s against the law for me to kill? I absolutely do not!”

— Samantha Irby

47. “Hello, 911? I am the first person at this party.”

— Samantha Irby

48. “What’s not to love about being expertly lit and drunk at two in the afternoon? But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed.”

— Samantha Irby

49. “I like traveling to other places to do the exact same things I do at home: read books in bed, occasionally get over-priced takeout, and groan exasperatedly at tourists chattering excitedly outside my door over whatever thrilling activity they are about to go do.”

— Samantha Irby

50. “If good things ever happened to me, I would say that some grief-stricken mutual friend of ours will be sobbing gently while digging up the yard of one of my many enemies to plant trees fed by our biodegradable burial pods so that he forever has to live his life in my shade.”

— Samantha Irby