Mistress America Quotes

  • Brooke: You are much more of an asshole than you initially appear.

  • Brooke: Sometimes I look like I have fat arms.

    Dylan: I like fat arms.

  • Dylan: Whatever you're doing, it's working.

    Brooke: No, it isn't.

  • Tracy: Your tragedy is your armor.

    Brooke: Please, somebody defend me against this monster.

  • Nicolette: Why don't you just put pasta up her pussy?

  • Brooke: There's no adultery when you're eighteen. You should all be touching each other all the time.

  • Brooke: I'll probably end up doing something depressing, but young.

  • Tony: I need someone I can love, not keep up with.

  • Tracy: If I could only keep up my look, I'd be the most beautiful woman in the world.

  • Brooke: New York isn't the New York I used to know. There's too much construction.

  • Brooke: I thought I might actually go to college. I'm not an amputee.

  • Brooke: I like to drink.

  • Tracy: I'm so impressed by you and so worried for you at the same time.

  • Brooke: Stop calling her these old-timey names.

  • Brooke: You think that I'm a running carcass, that I'm doomed to failure?

  • Brooke: I don't give a shit, because I am not a friend of Tennessee Williams.

  • Brooke: Of course it's possible to hurt me. I'm the most sensitive person.

  • Dylan: I just learned what case-sensitive meant, like seriously, yesterday.

  • Tracy: I went through a breakup too.

  • Tracy: If I'm not in my body, where am I?

  • Brooke: I think I'm sick, and I don't know if my ailment has a name. It's just me sitting and staring at the internet or the television for long periods of time, interspersed by trying to not do that and then lying about what I've been doing. And then I'll get so excited about something that the excitement overwhelms me and I can't sleep or do anything and I just am in love with everything but can't figure out how to make myself work in the world.

    Tracy: I think I have that too.

  • [Last lines]

    Tracy: [narrating] Meadow had made rich fat women less fat, and rich stupid kids less stupid, and lame rich men less lame. And she wanted so badly to be on the other side... to be fat and stupid and lame and rich. But what she couldn't see most of all, more than she couldn't see that she was never going to get the restaurant, was that those people were *nothing* compared to her. They were matches to her bonfire. She was the last cowboy, all romance and failure. The world was changing, and her kind didn't have anywhere to go. Being a beacon of hope for lesser people... is a lonely business.

  • Tracy: It was clear that the thing that Meadow wanted most in the world, the thing that she wanted to define her, to give her a place to put her time and talents, her everything, the restaurant, it was clear that it will never happen. The most surprising thing was that Meadow was actually surprised by it. She could see the world with painful accuracy, but she couldn't see herself or her fate. And because I was in love with her I decided I couldn't see it either.

  • Brooke: I want the whole deal. I want the dead-on-my-feet-wake-up-and-I'm-40. I've spent my whole life chasing after things and knocking at doors... and I'm tired of running towards people. I want to be the place that people come to. I want to make a home for all the knockers and runners. I'm good at that. I'm happy with that. I keep the hearth. That's a word, right? Hearth?

  • Brooke: That's cool about the frozen yogurt machine. Everyone I know dies.

  • Brooke: It's weird that someone that studies rocks is really into Jesus.

  • Brooke: I just wasn't brought up that way.

  • Brooke: I don't give a shit because I'm not a friend of Tennessee Williams!

  • Tracy's mom: You aren't sarcastic, don't pretend to be.

  • Brooke: I never went to college. I'm an autodidact. Do you know what that means?

    Tracy: Yes

    Brooke: That word is one of the things that I self-taught myself.

  • Brooke: What's going on at college?

    Tracy: Everyone's really excited about the frozen yogurt machine in the student center.

    Brooke: I watched my mother die.

    Tracy: What?

    Brooke: I was with my mother while she died.

    Tracy: I don't know any dead people.

    Brooke: That's cool about the frozen yogurt machine. Everyone I love dies.

    BrookeTracy: Laughter

  • Brooke: You can't *really* know what it is to *want* things until you're *at least* 30. And then with each passing year, it gets bigger... because the *want* is more, and the *possibility* is less. Like how each passing year of your life seems faster because it's a smaller portion of your total life. Like that. But in reverse. Everything becomes pure want.

  • Brooke: I know I'm funny. I know everything about myself. That's why I can't do therapy.

  • Tracy: Sometimes I really just think I'm smarter and better than everyone else. Not necessarily with math or science, or whether something is "East" or "West", but pretty much with everything else. And, if I could figure out my look, I'd be the most beautiful woman in the world, too.

    Tony: Sometimes I think I'm a genius. And I wish I could just fast-forward my life to the part where everyone knows it.

  • Tracy: You want other people to do the things you can't so you can blame them.

    Tony: *You used to be so nice.*

    Tracy: I'm the same. I'm just the same in another direction now.

  • Dylan: If you started the restaurant, you would be back here in a year asking for *five* times this.

    Brooke: Not if it was successful.

    Dylan: What are the odds?

  • [Everybody is reading Tracy's story. Brooke starts to turn the page. Everyone at once]

    Karen: Just...

    Tony: Yes please.

    Dylan: No...

    Mamie-Claire: Wait, it hasn't done yet.

  • [First lines]

    Tracy: [narrating] She would say things like, "Isn't every story a story of betrayal?" No, that's not true, I thought. But I could never say that. I could only agree with her. It was too much fun to agree with her.