Top 80 Stephanie Danler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Taste, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the slaty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.”

— Stephanie Danler

2. “As I contemplated the skyline this double feeling came to me as one thought, pressing in from either side of the bridge, impossible for me to reconcile: It is ludicrous for anyone to live here and I can never leave.”

— Stephanie Danler

3. “I wanted to say, My life is full. I chose this life because it’s a constant assault of color and taste and light and it’s raw and ugly and fast and it’s mine. And you’ll never understand. Until you live it, you don’t know.”

— Stephanie Danler

4. “Hey, new girl. You know the straw that broke the camel’s back? Is that the same thing as the last straw?”

— Stephanie Danler

5. “That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good sound track with knowledge. He.”

— Stephanie Danler

6. “There’s no word for it in English. Like tristesse, flaneur, or la douler exquise, words full of gray. The French do ambiguity so much better than Americans. Our language relies on fixedness because that’s what the market demands. A commodity must always be identifiable.”

— Stephanie Danler

7. “When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.”

— Stephanie Danler

8. “You,” she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. “I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse.”

— Stephanie Danler

9. “It’s alway the simple things, well executed, that are memorable.”

— Stephanie Danler

10. “All right, Tess. You want it all? You don’t care about consequences? Then it is too late. I could tell you to leave him alone. That he’s complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn’t sexy, it’s scary. You’re still young enough to think every experience will improve you in some long-term way, but it isn’t true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?”

— Stephanie Danler

11. “You know what I dislike? When people use the future as a consolation for the present. I don’t know if there is anything less helpful.”

— Stephanie Danler

12. “Any business transaction – actually any life transaction – is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.”

— Stephanie Danler

13. “It’s brave if you make it, foolish if you fail.”

— Stephanie Danler

14. “Get out of your head. If you don’t you’ll always be disappointed. Pay attention.”

— Stephanie Danler

15. “Or maybe it means we’ve forgotten ourselves. And we keep forgetting ourselves. And that’s the big grown-up secret to survival.” I.”

— Stephanie Danler

16. “Everything she touched she added an apostrophe to.”

— Stephanie Danler

17. “You will encounter a fifth taste. Umami: uni, or sea urchin, anchovies, Parmesan, dry-aged beef with a casing of mold. It’s glutamate. Nothing is a mystery anymore. They make MSG to mimic it. It’s the taste of ripeness that’s about to ferment. Initially, it serves as a warning. But after a familiarity develops, after you learn its name, that precipice of rot becomes the only flavor worth pursuing, the only line worth testing.”

— Stephanie Danler

18. “Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We’ve tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood.”

— Stephanie Danler

19. “A saccharine, sentimental drip ran down my throat, and I was blinded by how stupid I had been not to see that everything was absolutely, one hundred percent going to be okay.”

— Stephanie Danler

20. “It is a strange pressure to be across from a man who wants something that you don’t want to give. It’s like standing in a forceful current, which at first you think is not too strong, but the longer you stand, the more tired you become, the harder it is to stay upright.”

— Stephanie Danler

21. “I mean that we can allow ourselves to live and not really know what it is that we’re doing. That’s all right. It’s an accumulation stage.”

— Stephanie Danler

22. “Aging is peculiar,” she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. “I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy – when the books, clothes, bars, technology – when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?”

— Stephanie Danler

23. “Every beautiful animal knows when it’s being hunted.”

— Stephanie Danler

24. “She belonged to herself only. She had edges, boundaries, tastes, definition down to her eyelashes. And when she walked it was clear she knew where she was going.”

— Stephanie Danler

25. “Sundays had a candid feeling. There were no laws, no stakes.”

— Stephanie Danler

26. “What I didn’t see was that the time had severe brackets around it. Within those brackets nothing else existed. Outside of them, all you could remember was the blur of a momentary madness.”

— Stephanie Danler

27. “You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It’s our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure.”

— Stephanie Danler

28. “You will develop a palate. A palate is a spot on your tongue where you remember. Where you assign words to the textures of taste. Eating becomes a discipline, language-obsessed. You will never simply eat food again.”

— Stephanie Danler

29. “SWEET: granular, powdered, brown, slow like honey or molasses. The mouth-coating sugars in milk. Once, when we were wild, sugar intoxicated us, the first narcotic we craved and languished in. We’ve tamed, refined it, but the juice from a peach still runs like a flash flood. –.”

— Stephanie Danler

30. “A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.”

— Stephanie Danler

31. “I thought that once I got to this city nothing could ever catch up with me because I could remake my life daily. Once that had made me feel infinite. Now I was certain I would never learn. Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.”

— Stephanie Danler

32. “It’s an epidemic with women your age. A gross disparity between the way that they speak and the quality of thoughts that they’re having about the world. They.”

— Stephanie Danler

33. “I’m giving you permission to take yourself seriously. To take the stuff of this world seriously. And to start having. That’s abundance.”

— Stephanie Danler

34. “Our binges on each other were constructing something behind our backs: the stubborn stains of intimacy marked our hands.”

— Stephanie Danler

35. “Tess,′ she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, ’your body doesn’t always need to need. There is a still point at the center.”

— Stephanie Danler

36. “Lust rubied my blood, gave me the gait of an uncaught criminal, and I felt like I could walk forever.”

— Stephanie Danler

37. “My life is full. I chose this life because it’s a constant assault of color and taste and light and it’s raw and ugly and fast and it’s mine.”

— Stephanie Danler

38. “BITTER: always a bit unanticipated. Coffee, chocolate, rosemary, citrus rinds, wine. Once, when we were wild, it told us about poison. The mouth still hesitates at each new encounter. We urge it forward, say, Adapt. Now, enjoy it.”

— Stephanie Danler

39. “TERROIR. I looked it up in The World Atlas of Wine in the manager’s office. The definition was people talking around it without identifying it. It seemed a bit far-fetched. That food had character, composed of the soil, the climate, the time of year. That you could taste that character. But still. An idea mystical enough to be highly seductive.”

— Stephanie Danler

40. “It was Simone who used to say, on her better days, “Don’t worry, little one, none of this will leave a scratch.”

— Stephanie Danler

41. “God, how I loved him. Not him exactly, let me try again: I loved his ghost.”

— Stephanie Danler

42. “Pigeons flew in diminishing waves between the low buildings. The sun rose. It said, Now that you’ve done this, you can never have that. Now that I’m like this, I can never go back.”

— Stephanie Danler

43. “The city does sleep, the windows darken and the streets vacate. New York dreams us. Wild, somnambulistic creatures, we move unhurried toward our own disappearance at dawn.”

— Stephanie Danler

44. “We always just miss New York. I watched it with this neighborhood. When I moved here everyone was mourning SoHo of the seventies, Tribeca of the eighties, and already ringing the death knell for the East Village. Now people romanticize the Alphabet City of Jonathan Larson. We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.”

— Stephanie Danler

45. “SALT: your mouth waters itself. Flakes from Brittany, liquescent on contact. Blocks of pink salt from the Himalayas, matte gray clumps from Japan. And endless stream of kosher salt, falling from Chef’s hand. Salting the most nuanced of enterprises, the food always requesting more, but the tipping point fatal.”

— Stephanie Danler

46. “When you’re older you will know that at some unconscious level not only did you see it coming, but you created it, in your own blind, stumbling way. You will console yourself with the fact that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing it or not seeing it. You were a sponge for incident.”

— Stephanie Danler

47. “I DIDN’T KNOW what a date was and I wasn’t an anomaly. Most of the girls I knew didn’t get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination.”

— Stephanie Danler

48. “You think it impresses me that you know how to hurt yourself?”

— Stephanie Danler

49. “No, I said. Nothing you do is ever embarrassing. You’re not a girl.”

— Stephanie Danler

50. “I said, “It really didn’t feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?”

— Stephanie Danler