Top 150 Sloane Crosley Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Book tours are such a little tapas meal of where I could live.”

— Sloane Crosley

102. “The hardest thing is spending twelve hours a day accommodating the rest of the world, then going home at night and criticizing it. I would be curious about what I’d write if I didn’t have to worry about offending.”

— Sloane Crosley

103. “Normally, I am a vocal advocate for ‘looking both ways’ and ‘knowing the size of one’s own body.’ But working, socialising and simply running errands in Manhattan, means I am bound to break my own rules on occasion.”

— Sloane Crosley

104. “Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do.”

— Sloane Crosley

105. “Besides, a new decade is a chance to find oneself at the beginning of things. Oh, life! What a sweet little Etch A Sketch of time you are!”

— Sloane Crosley

106. “When it seems impossible that a deep connection with another person could just go away instead of changing form. It seems impossible that you will one day look up and say the words “I used to date someone who lived in that building,” referring to a three-year relationship. As simple as if it was a pizza place that is now a dry cleaner’s. It happens. Keep walking.”

— Sloane Crosley

107. “I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off one’s cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.”

— Sloane Crosley

108. “I was compiling a list in my head titled ‘Reasons to Get Up: You Don’t Have to Leave, but You Can’t Pee Here.”

— Sloane Crosley

109. “I think humor is the social use. You can put anything in it. I think – yes, I speak heavily in analogies – it is like putting the medicine in apple sauce or a block of cheese for a dog. Not that anyone in this room is a dog in this scenario.”

— Sloane Crosley

110. “Since graduation, I have measured time in 4-by-5-inch pieces of paper, four days on the left and three on the right. Every social engagement, interview, reading, flight, doctor’s appointment, birthday and dry-cleaning reminder has been handwritten between metal loops.”

— Sloane Crosley

111. “I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn’t grow up here.”

— Sloane Crosley

112. “The real proof that I have tried to love and that people have tried to love me back was never going to fit in a kitchen drawer.”

— Sloane Crosley

113. “It should be noted that my mother has a long history of being disturbingly unperturbed by what normal people deem perturbing. Certain things simply don’t strike her as worthy of a sit-down.”

— Sloane Crosley

114. “I write on weekends, on vacation, and, really – on deadline and on my floor. Both terrible for the back.”

— Sloane Crosley

115. “You can’t fall away from something if you were never there in the first place. It’s the difference between jumping off a cliff and passing out where you stand.”

— Sloane Crosley

116. “The lies we construct to defend ourselves from humiliation are the strongest, refusing to be torn down.”

— Sloane Crosley

117. “Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.”

— Sloane Crosley

118. “The question is never “Should I be annoyed?” but “How annoyed should I be?”

— Sloane Crosley

119. “I am the proud indentured servant of a brilliant art adviser who may or may not have purposely stapled my index finger to a manila folder.”

— Sloane Crosley

120. “My A-number one visceral fear is speed. More than knives or snakes or confined spaces. Speed. I won’t even go on a motor boat if I can help it.”

— Sloane Crosley

121. “Perhaps if I’d had God in my life growing up I would have been able to understand the total and complete unfairness of the universe rewarding mean girls.”

— Sloane Crosley

122. “I reason that I can take 36 hours of pretty much anything. This is willfully off-base logic with zero anecdotal evidence.”

— Sloane Crosley

123. “I think by now we can all agree that the foundation of world travel goes something like “Bring a cardigan.”

— Sloane Crosley

124. “I thought of the past and how one should have respect for it, like the elderly.”

— Sloane Crosley

125. “On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing.”

— Sloane Crosley

126. “I do think New York prepares you for the crossection of personalities and realities on display when you leave the country, and I’d live somewhere else if I had a reason or burning-the-the-point-of-discomfort desire to do so.”

— Sloane Crosley

127. “It’s not dissimilar to the reality-TV-show contestant’s ungrammatical attempt to appear grammatical, a quirk of using the subject pronoun after a preposition, instead of the correct object version. So: You have to choose between Brad or I.”

— Sloane Crosley

128. “My roommate came running out of the closet and did not stop until he reached Los Angeles. I knew this day would come. Sometimes it’s easier to be your actual self where nothing of your alleged self exists. Sometimes that’s how you find out who you are in the first place.”

— Sloane Crosley

129. “Francine looked up and mouthed, “Thank you.” “any titme,” I lied.”

— Sloane Crosley

130. “I was the youngest of my entire family so you are tap-dancing to try to get the attention of your older cousins. I really hit my social stride in 6th grade, but before that I was a pretty big dork. You learn how to be amusing and how to work for it.”

— Sloane Crosley

131. “What annoyed me was that I so often attempted to weasel out of things on purpose, it killed me to do it by accident. It seemed like a waste of whatever detailed lie I was going to have to come up with.”

— Sloane Crosley

132. “The “pass” was a normal-sized key with a wooden block the size of a brick attached to it. This was meant to broadcast the administration’s lack of faith in our ability to hold on to small objects.”

— Sloane Crosley

133. “I prefer to record all traumas and save them for later, playing them over and over so they can haunt me for a disproportionate number of weeks to come. It’s very healthy.”

— Sloane Crosley

134. “There is a point in most abusive relationships when it occurs to the beaten party that they are guilty of putting their face in the way of someone else’s fist.”

— Sloane Crosley

135. “Why do people always want to put their hands on vulnerability? I sped up.”

— Sloane Crosley

136. “It’s so clear to me now: the memorizing of a fake prayer, the symbolization of objects, the struggle to relate to the invisible – I needed a religion. I was lost.”

— Sloane Crosley

137. “To live alone can be a glorious thing. Between jags of crippling loneliness and wretched TV, it’s an education in self-sufficiency, self-actualization, and self-tanner. But it is possible to have too many rooms of one’s own.”

— Sloane Crosley

138. “But sometimes, when I’m alone, I run my fingers over the photo, even though it doesn’t feel like anything. I focus on one egg at random, imagining this will be the one my body uses to make a person, a person that grows up and reads this, and I think – Oh girl, I hope you set the world on fire.”

— Sloane Crosley

139. “There is something inherently manly about climbing a mountain. Though, taken literally, that would make a deep sea dive the most feminine activity on the planet.”

— Sloane Crosley

140. “Los Angeles had its faults, metaphorical and geophysical, but it was not a malicious place. People were nice here. Hollywood was the grade school teacher who started you off with an “A” until you failed. New York was the one who gave you an “F” until you proved you deserved better.”

— Sloane Crosley

141. “The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges.”

— Sloane Crosley

142. “I don’t think I meant a word of it. But this is how you speak when you’re in a bathroom stall in your twenties, high on cocaine, and testing the depths of your friendships.”

— Sloane Crosley

143. “The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith. Meanwhile, odds were quantifiable but chances were not. Chances were abstract and “for” whereas odds were concrete and “against.”

— Sloane Crosley

144. “Love is agreeing to live in someone else’s narrative.”

— Sloane Crosley

145. “A hero without a damsel is a mere man.”

— Sloane Crosley

146. “Just because something ends prematurely doesn’t mean it won’t end eventually. Usually that’s exactly what it means.”

— Sloane Crosley

147. “The city was a parade of places shut down, left early from, arrived late to, sat in front of, met to say goodbye at. This is how it was for everyone. If you wait long enough, anyplace will become a barracks of the romantic undead, a sprawling museum of personal bombs.”

— Sloane Crosley

148. “Men, who can be so oblivious in most arenas, are very good a knowing when a woman’s heart has left the building.”

— Sloane Crosley

149. “The reality of an image both expands and narrows the imagination. It breathes, inhaling the new understanding and exhaling the old one.”

— Sloane Crosley

150. “It’s unfortunate, I thought, how some of the world’s most productive conversations are breakup conversations. People think, “If only we could have talked like this the whole time, things would’ve been different.” But you couldn’t have. That level of honesty requires a resoluteness achievable only by being within spitting distance of the exit.”

— Sloane Crosley