Top 150 Sloane Crosley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The world I describe is about how people live now. It’s not about zany people with unlimited, inexplicable funds in an apartment somewhere.”

— Sloane Crosley

52. “You can’t possibly fathom the ins and outs of a prepubescent beauty treatment until you’ve felt the strange but exhilarating tingle of a cottage-cheese-and-Pop-Rocks facial.”

— Sloane Crosley

53. “In New York, if you weigh under 200 pounds and decline so much as a cookie at a co-worker’s party, women will flock to your side, assuring you of your appealing physique. This is how skittish we are about the dangers of anorexia and the pressures of body image.”

— Sloane Crosley

54. “Everything in New York seems to merit preserving. If it’s not historical, it’s personal. If it’s not personal, it’s cultural. But you can’t. You can’t save everything. You just have to pack it up in your brain and take it with you when you go.”

— Sloane Crosley

55. “I now know my right from my left and my up from my down. Unluckily, my terrible sense of direction remains. For me, to live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never ever make a smooth entrance, always to get caught looking lost on the street.”

— Sloane Crosley

56. “For a long time I wanted to draw, but I could never get the proportions right. My still life sketches were the artistic equivalent of someone who has misjudged the space constraints of a postcard, the handwriting shrinking uncomfortably at the bottom.”

— Sloane Crosley

57. “Juice cleansing has been all the rage for some time. And I used the word ‘rage’ advisedly; one must push a violent flood of liquidised vegetables and fruit through one’s system for at least three days in order to perform a ‘cleanse.’”

— Sloane Crosley

58. “My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book ‘Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers’ – this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford’s wire hangers look like pool noodles.”

— Sloane Crosley

59. “The search for one’s first professional job is not unlike a magical love potion: when one wants to fall in love with the next thing one sees, one generally does.”

— Sloane Crosley

60. “I have come to understand myself as more of a New York writer, or more of a woman writer, but I don’t feel like that while I’m writing. But I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn’t grow up here.”

— Sloane Crosley

61. “Unless you are a professional, you will find the tart to be a high-maintenance, unforgiving whistle-blower of a pastry.”

— Sloane Crosley

62. “As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day.”

— Sloane Crosley

63. “For the average person, taken to their sick bed, it takes a serious bout of pneumonia or a full body cast to completely forget the life they had prior to falling off the rollercoaster. I, however, will do this over a paper cut on my thumb, obsessing of said cut and being generally consumed by it.”

— Sloane Crosley

64. “I thought I was going to write fiction but I fell backwards into non-fiction. It started when I got locked out of two apartments in one day and I told the story to some friends, one of whom worked in the ‘Village Voice’ and asked me to turn it into an essay.”

— Sloane Crosley

65. “We’ve come to expect so little from online privacy measures that public displays of concern about the matter are more or less for show. Being devastated to discover you’ve been tagged in somebody else’s photo has an air of the melodramatic about it at this point.”

— Sloane Crosley

66. “I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.”

— Sloane Crosley

67. “It takes a level of creative depression to hear ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ and weep.”

— Sloane Crosley

68. “No affair that begins with such an orchestrated overture can end on a simple note.”

— Sloane Crosley

69. “As we grow up, it feels like you should either invite people into your life or not. There should be fewer and fewer instances of friends you ‘can only take in small doses.’”

— Sloane Crosley

70. “I don’t understand how you can be a decent writer and not know people.”

— Sloane Crosley

71. “There’s an ‘Everything must go!’ emotional liquidation feel to the end of your twenties, isn’t there? What will happen if we turn thirty and we’re not ‘ready?’ You don’t feel entirely settled in any aspect of your life, even if you are on paper.”

— Sloane Crosley

72. “In New York and LA, there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something.”

— Sloane Crosley

73. “A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it.”

— Sloane Crosley

74. “I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it’s a paragraph.”

— Sloane Crosley

75. “But now my problems had been set loose. They could be anywhere at any time and I was just like everyone else I knew: almost positive that there was something profoundly and undiagnosably wrong with me.”

— Sloane Crosley

76. “I don’t really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don’t think of them as a memoir. They’re essays; they’re not an autobiography.”

— Sloane Crosley

77. “For me, nothing brings out my ‘born yesterday’ idiotic qualities quite like having my photograph taken.”

— Sloane Crosley

78. “Out of all artists, authors are the least trained for the spotlight. Wanting attention isn’t a requisite part of the package.”

— Sloane Crosley

79. “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.”

— Sloane Crosley

80. “Yes. I am writing full-time. Which is strange. It feels like not having a job.”

— Sloane Crosley

81. “I do want to get married. It’s a nice idea. Though I think husbands are like tattoos – you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, ‘I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now. I’ll take a thorny rose and a “MOM” anchor, please. No, not that one – the big one.”

— Sloane Crosley

82. “I don’t do emoticons unless I’m making a big deal out of them. I’ll type out, ‘This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.’ And then do it.”

— Sloane Crosley

83. “Everyone knows WebMD is a Choose Your Own Adventure book in which all roads lead to death.”

— Sloane Crosley

84. “Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it’s usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is ‘fairy lights,’ which we boringly refer to as ‘Christmas lights.’”

— Sloane Crosley

85. “I was surprised by how much I loved Portland. It is so wonderfully creative without being artsy. Great food scene.”

— Sloane Crosley

86. “It is my belief that people who speak of high school with a sugary fondness are bluffing away early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

— Sloane Crosley

87. “I definitely rediscovered reading for pleasure by devoting such a large swath of my time to sitting on airplanes. I am now painfully adept at removing my shoes so as to have the least amount of foot surface area touching an airport floor.”

— Sloane Crosley

88. “Picture it in your mind’s nostril: you get in a cab in time to catch twin thugs named Vomit and Cologne assaulting a defenseless pine-tree air freshener.”

— Sloane Crosley

89. “As most doctors will tell you, cleansing is ridiculous. You know what’s been around longer than that state-of-the-art juicer? Your kidneys. And your liver. Still, the cleanse has recalibrated my definition of a splurge.”

— Sloane Crosley

90. “Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they’re being trusted as a friend.”

— Sloane Crosley

91. “New Yorkers have a delightfully narcissistic habit of assuming that if they’re not conscious of a scene, it doesn’t exist.”

— Sloane Crosley

92. “Weddings are friendship deal breakers if the friendship is weak. There are too many favors, too many tasks, too much required devotion and Aqua Net for imposters like me. I tried to make eye contact with Francine, to give her a knowing good-bye smile like a ghost of a loved one in a movie. It was no usue, I decided to cut my final pink wire. There would be no more yearly “happy birthdays” and certainly no more bonding with the girl in the duct tape dress. That ship had sailed.”

— Sloane Crosley

93. “Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.”

— Sloane Crosley

94. “Cohabitation seems a greater leap in cities because it’s all the harder to extract oneself if things turn sour. It’s what keeps otherwise functional adults living with their mothers.”

— Sloane Crosley

95. “I love giving people advice on what to do with their books, but I don’t really know how a Kindle Single gets covered.”

— Sloane Crosley

96. “I felt like I wasn’t doing justice to either side of my life. It wasn’t pronounced. Publicity is an awkward thing to do. It is awkward to call people up all the time and ask them for things on a very basic level.”

— Sloane Crosley

97. “I think it’s hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.”

— Sloane Crosley

98. “We are only as good as our most extreme experiences.”

— Sloane Crosley

99. “It’s never good to fall in love with someone whom you’d have to stab in the eyeballs to elicit a response.”

— Sloane Crosley

100. “The truth is, I wrote a novel when I was 23. It’s hideously bad. Truly rotten.”

— Sloane Crosley