1
" 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
6
" I'm sick of that, I said. Young, young, young, that's what I get, all day, everyday. But I know your secret....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. I don't have to compromise yet. I don't have to do a single thing I don't want to do. That's why you hate me. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
13
" I came here in a car like everybody else. In a car filled with shit I thought meant something and shortly thereafter tossed on the street: DVDs, soon to be irrelevant, a box of digital and film cameras for a still-latent photography talent, a copy of On the Road that I couldn’t finish, and a Swedish-modern lamp from Walmart. It was a long, dark drive from a place so small you couldn’t find it on a generous map...Does anyone come to New York clean? I’m afraid not….Yes, I’d come to escape, but from what? The twin pillars of football and church? The low, faded homes on childless cul-de-sacs? Morning of the Gazette and boxed doughnuts? The sedated, sentimental middle of it? It didn’t matter. I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitely forward...Let’s say I was born in late June of 2006 when I came over the George Washington Bridge at seven a.m. with the sun circulating and dawning, the sky full of sharp corners of light, before the exhaust rose, before the heat gridlocked in, windows unrolled, radio turned up to some impossibly hopeful pop song, open, open, open. "
― Stephanie Danler , Sweetbitter
