Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Chelsea Girls:
“If the end of one's youth is a thin slice of cheese I ate mine standing in that room. I was there because I was hungry. That's all.”
“If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch,”
“I have waited all my life for permission. I feel it growing in my breast. A war is storming and it is behind me and I am moving my forces into light.”
“You can’t force a story that doesn’t want to be told.”
“Allen Ginsberg asked me to sign his book. I must've stood there for five minutes drawing a complete blank. Hi Allen, from one howl to another. Dear Allen I'm glad you think I'm a poet. Love, Eileen. I'm the only woman you like, right Allen? Only the craziest thoughts passed through my mind. Finally he started getting embarrassed. Just sign it. Come by and write something better when you think of it. I scrawled something. I forget what it was.”
“If boys were always trying to get in girls’ pants, what did they want? What could the girls give them? Pee it seemed to me was an appropriate gift.”
“You know how you’re always half hungry while in bed. Well this was like sleeping with a meal, a big fried meal, you have your arms around it.”
“I wish I could remember how the days went. I feel like I'm looking through a window at my own past, and if I could just trace it with my fingertips or my breath on it I could see where I've been.”
“You had a couple of Adidas teeshirts. I don’t get it, I said. You said it’s a joke. You kind of shrugged. “I have this funny kind of sense of humor.” It was the exact same shrug you made a split second before you kissed me on the night we became lovers. Colombo was on teevee and we were sitting on a rolled up exercise mat on the floor. The look on your face, my favorite look was here goes. It looked like the smallest decision, like a boat slightly turning but now absolutely going in that direction. I was fixed.”
“Fear of not being understood is the greatest fear I thought lying on the bathroom floor at 11P.M. worse than not pleasing people, worse than anything else I can think of. Worse than being cold or alone. Worse than getting old.”
“Everything I did was something to fix me. With all my heart I was trying to be dead.”
“I just need to tell this story for me or else I will burst. It's lonely to be alive and never know the whole story. Everyone must walk with that thought. I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.”
“I wonder what anybody thinks about using your own life, the actual words people say to you in the secrecy of love, or separation, or the oblivious moments when they’ve simply torn off an insult and flung it at you and you’re the one who remembers every little word, at least the ones I use and I fling it back in their faces, if not there, then here, sooner or later and they say, “Oh, I can’t believe I said that.”
“I wonder what anybody thinks about using your own life. The actual words people say to you in the secrecy of love or separation or the oblivious moments when they've simply torn off an insult and flung it at you, and you're the one who remembers every little word, at least the ones I use, and I fling it back in their faces. If not there, then here, sooner or later, and they say, "Oh, I can't believe I said that.”
“It’s so easy to give up – to live in dreams with yourself instead of in stories with a friend. I distrust dreams. It’s just your brain re-stirring information uselessly, fending for itself in another dimension, making movies of its own fears and you wake up horrified or calmed by something that never happened or dissatisfied and you go back down for more which is all you get. Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get. I bet that’s all dead people do, dream endlessly, and dreams are death in training.”
“It's so easy to give up - to live in dreams with yourself instead of in stories with a friend. I distrust dreams. it's just your brain re-stirring information uselessly, fending for itself in another dimension, making movies of its own fears and you wake up horrified or calmed by something that never happened or dissatisfied and you go back down for more which is all you get. Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get. I bet that's all dead people do, dream endlessly, and dreams are death in training.”
