City of Girls Quotes

But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person - a person without honor - might take. Such an instance may hurt, but that’s why honor is a painful field.”

“Yet I can tell you that there was a lonely and untenanted corner of my heart that I’d never known was there—and Frank moved right into it. Holding him in my heart made me feel like I belonged to love itself.”

“When I was younger, I had wanted to be at the very center of all the action in New York, but I slowly came to realize that there is no one center. The center is everywhere - wherever people are living out their lives. It’s a city with a million centers.”

“Those girls are on the road to trouble,” I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk—and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn’t understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted. Oh, our youthful needs! Oh, the deliciously blinding yearnings of the young—which inevitably take us right to the edges of cliffs, or trap us in cul-de-sacs of our design.”

“She was of the mind that people should make their own decisions about their own lives, if you can image such a preposterous thing.”

“I always hated hearing old people yammering on like this when I was young. And I do what to assure you: I’m aware that many thing were not better in the 1940s. Underarm deodorants and air-conditioning were woefully inadequate, for instance, so everybody stank like crazy, especially in the summer, and also we had Hitler.”

“Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.”

“Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.”

“Love is like that is a deep well with steep sides. Once you fall in, that’s it. You will love that person always.”

“At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”

“Not many people know how to be satisfied.”

“Whenever you are faced with the prospect of purchasing gloves, you must ask yourself if you would be bereft to lose one of them in the back of a taxicab. If not, then don’t buy them. You should only buy gloves so beautiful that to lose one of them would break your heart.”

“The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”

“In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all. After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain - yet somehow, still, we carry on.”

“I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life’s greatest secret pleasures.”

“After a certain age, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you’re always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.”

“I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.”

“Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I’ve always witnessed.”

“Sometimes it’s just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.”

“Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.”

“You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.”

Without a doubt, you were lucky to be raised here. But you never got to move here—and for that, I am sorry for you. You missed one of life’s great experiences. New York City in 1940! There will never be another New York like that one. I’m not defaming all the New Yorks that came before 1940, or all the New Yorks that came after 1940. They all have their importance. But this is a city that gets born anew in the fresh eyes of every young person who arrives here for the first time. So that city, that place—newly created for my eyes only—will never exist again. It is preserved forever in my memory like an orchid trapped in a paperweight. That city will always be my perfect New York.”

“If you’re a coward--and let’s just say that you are, for the sake of argument--it means nothing. My Aunt Peg, she’s an alcoholic. She can’t handle drinking. It ruins her life and turns her into a mess--and do you know what that means? It means nothing. Do you think it makes her a bad person? Of course not--it’s just the way she is. Alcoholism just happened to her, Frank. Things happen to people. We are the way we are--there’s nothing to be done for it. My Uncle Billy--he couldn’t keep a promise or stay faithful to a woman. It meant nothing. He was a wonderful person, Frank, and he was completely untrustworthy. It’s just how he was. It didn’t mean anything. We all still loved him.”

“Everyone should leave the table feeling as if they’ve gotten a bad deal,” my father once taught me joylessly. “This way, you may rest assured that nobody was taken for a ride, and that nobody can get too far ahead.”

“When women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.”