Sweetbitter Quotes

“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 are taught to express themselves in slang, in clichés, sarcasm—all of which is weak language. The superficiality of the language colors the experiences, rendering them disposable instead of assimilated. And then to top it all, you call yourselves ‘girls.’ ”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“Any business transaction—actually any life transaction—is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“Not being able to swipe into the subway when people are backing up behind you. Waiting for him at the bar. Leaving your purse open on a stool with a mess of bills visible. Mispronouncing the names while presenting French wines. Your clogs slipping on the waxed floors. The way your arms shoot out and you tense your face when you almost fall. Taking your job seriously. Watching the sex scene from Dirty Dancing on repeat and eating a box of gingersnaps for dinner on your day off. Forgetting your stripes, your work pants, your socks. Mentally mapping the bar for corners where you might catch him alone. Getting drunker faster than everyone else. Not knowing what foie gras is. Not knowing what you think about abortion. Not knowing what a feminist is. Not knowing who the mayor is. Throwing up between your feet on the subway stairs. On a Tuesday. Going back for thirds at family meal. Excruciating diarrhea in the employee bathroom. Hurting yourself when you hit your head on the low pipe. Refusing to leave the bar though it's over, completely over. Bleeding in every form. Beer stains on your shirt, grease stains on your jeans, stains in every form. Saying you know where something is when you have absolutely no idea where it is.

At some point, I leveled out. Everything stopped being embarrassing.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“I had a ritual—and having any ritual sounded so mature that I told everyone about it, even the regulars. On my days off I woke up late and went to the coffee shop and had a cappuccino and read. Then around five p.m., when the light was failing, I would take out a bottle of dry sherry and pour myself a glass, take out a jar of green olives, put on Miles Davis, and read the wine atlas. I didn't know why it felt so luxurious, but one day I realized that ritual was why I had moved to New York—to eat olives and get tipsy and read about Nebbiolo while the sun set. I had created a life that was bent in service to all my personal cravings.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“It’s brave if you make it, foolish if you fail.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

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

“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, Sweetbitter

“Tasting is a farce,” she said with her eyes closed, nose deep in the bowl of the glass. “The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That’s the only way to learn anything—you have to live with it.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“I had never thought of a tomato as a fruit—the ones I had known were mostly white in the center and rock hard. But this was so luscious, so tart I thought it victorious. So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“We called them the Nine-to-Fivers. They lived in accordance with nature, waking and sleeping with the cycle of the sun. Mealtimes, business hours, the world conformed to their schedule. The best markets, the A-list concerts, the street fairs, the banner festivities were on Saturdays and Sundays. They sold out movies, art openings, ceramics classes. They had evenings to waste. The watched the Super Bowl, they watched the Oscars, they made reservations for dinner because they ate dinner at a normal time. They brunched, ruthlessly, and read the Sunday Times on Sundays. They moved in crowds that reinforced their citizenship: crowded museums, crowded subways, crowded bars, the city teeming with extras for the movie they starred in.

They were dining, shopping, consuming, unwinding, expanding while we were working, diminishing, being absorbed into their scenery. That is why we -- the Industry People -- got so greedy when the Nine-to-Fivers went to bed.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“There are so many things to be blasé about: your youth, your health, your employment. But real food—gifts from the ocean, no less—is not one of them. It’s one of the only things that can immerse you safely in pleasure in this degraded, miserable place.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“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, Sweetbitter

“How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should supersede them.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“God, how I loved him. Not him exactly, let me try again: I loved his ghost.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“There’s no word for it in English. Like tristesse, flâneur, or la douleur 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, Sweetbitter

“You’re all terrified of young people. We remind you of what it was like to have ideals, faith, freedom. We remind you of the losses you’ve taken as you’ve grown cynical, numb, disenchanted, compromising the life you imagined.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“The vision that accompanied me on my drive was a girl, a lady actually. We had the same hair but she didn't look like me. She was in a camel coat and ankle boots. A dress under the coat was belted high on her waist. She carried various shopping bags from specialty stores and as she was walking, pausing at certain windows, her coat would fly back in the wind. Her boot heels tapped on the cobblestones. She had lovers and breakups, an analyst, a library, acquaintances she ran into on the street whose names she couldn't call to mind. 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, Sweetbitter