Calla Henkel > Quotes

“had a nearly full scholarship, I could make an omelette and I knew I wanted to be an artist. I believed that should be enough.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“She watched all the episodes of Sex and the City, swaying into the downtown bars and ordering a cosmopolitan, wondering if that’s all it would take to make the confetti of young adulthood start falling.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Whenever he'd launch into talking, his turtle-green eyes would get a dark zoom when he rummaged for words, like a hand silently dipping into a Scrabble bag, feeling for the next vowel.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People's Clothes

“I wasn’t in the mood for therapy, I was about to get my period and it was schnitzel night,”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“But I was impressed at Jens’s ability to wear both a button-up and a turtleneck at the same time, such a violent thing to do to a neck.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“I mean like, first the von Habsburg and now she’s obsessed with Mel, who by the way isn’t a Kennedy. I know she’s your roommate but—’ She pulled a safety pin from her purse, holding the point up to her eye, separating each lash, ‘Why are you even throwing these parties? Don’t you want to be an artist?’ Her lashes now looked like plucked spider legs, she shifted one eye to meet mine in the mirror, ‘I mean – don’t you want to take yourself seriously?’ ‘Hailey’s not a star-fucker and the parties are – art.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Friends were inspired to undercut each other with personal tidbits: Republican parents, unread seminal texts, porn predilections, leveraging weakness and sharing anecdotes that were wholly irrelevant to the work in question, all in the pursuit of power.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“I zoned out while staring at the bright jade beads that clung to her neck on a twist of thick silver. They looked expensive. Probably a gift after one of Tobias’s infidelities. I wanted that timeline: tennis bracelet for the bartender at King Size, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class for the stripper in Basel, an Oscar de la Renta gown after the stewardess over the Atlantic – or more likely Claire had a contract drawn up demanding a cheque be deposited in her personal bank account for each indiscretion.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“When the door creaked open we were hit by the smell of flowers, like at a funeral, sharp and final. A jet-black-haired woman stuck out a hand equipped with five crimson fingernails, and introduced herself as Beatrice Becks, her B’s popping when she said her name, “Beee-atrice Beee-cks.” I smiled cautiously, tossing the name in my mind like a coin.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Bryce was uncomfortable in my house, his horror was obvious, like that meme of Hillary Clinton entering a cramped fluorescently lit kitchen.”
― Calla Henkel, Scrap: A Novel

“I flushed with anger at her empty exuberance. She had thrown Ivy on the table like a poker chip. She had no filter. No breaks.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“You think it’s funny,’ she took a sip then shifted her body towards me, ‘you think you’re alternative, and outside of the system. You rented the interesting movies. And went to the noise concerts in Bushwick. And you, like everyone at that school, thought you had to be dirty and weird to be a good artist. But that’s not true.’ ‘I don’t think I’m alternative,’ I said incredulously.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“The airplane to Orlando was cold and quiet. I wanted peanuts, something salty. I shakily asked the flight attendant, who responded, “The peanut days are over.” The phrase felt like an epitaph.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Do you know how many rapes end up with a conviction? Five out of one thousand. There are currently two hundred and fifty thousand unsolved murder cases in America. And if you get killed by a police officer, you know how likely the officer will be held accountable? One in two thousand.”
― Calla Henkel, Scrap: A Novel

“still tried to perform the New York City stereotypes – I wore a black leather jacket, I rarely washed my brown hair, I drank coffee even if I didn’t like the taste, I had a fake ID, and I was perfectly comfortable saying fuck you. But the alien-hot-air rushing from the subway grates could petrify me. The psychic weight of all the people waiting at the stop light at 14th Street could render me unable to move my legs. Grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s was horrifying, and going to the post office overwhelming.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Oh, it’s straightforward but also not. Beatrice says she only found out On Blue Peak was plagiarised when a lawsuit arrived four years ago – they paid over a million in multiple settlements. So she clearly knew her mother had a history of this sort of behaviour, but she insists that she didn’t know she was watching you two.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“But she’s bulimic—’ she scoffed, ‘like have some self-control, there’s really nothing more pathetic. Bulimics should all be rounded up and shot, eat your fucking food or don’t.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Our ‘last photo of 2008’ had the same improbable unfortunateness with our over-painted lips and trashy poses, destined for some disaster.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“By the time Berlin’s summer was blazing, we – Hailey Mader and myself, Zoe Beech – were all anyone could talk about.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“missed drinking. I missed talking with friends, the late nights, snorting things, fucking people. Then as if a slide in the darkened room of art history class, the bright-red image of Hailey’s body in a room of fake blood flashed.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“He was one year older than me, a cynical computer dork with an intense MacBook stare—whenever he’d launch into talking, his turtle-green eyes would get a dark zoom while he rummaged for words, like a hand silently dipping into a Scrabble bag, feeling for the next vowel.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Yes! It’s The Crucible as perfect pop-media-gore. By far my favourite piece of performance this year. Well, other than all the celebrity car crashes.’ We all looked at her blankly. ‘Come on, Lindsay Lohan got another DUI. No one has a publicist any more.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“mat, ‘I hate openings here. At least in New York you don’t feel like you’re outside of some secret society.’ ‘It does seem like the same thirty people at each opening,’ I added.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“In New York I’d had a perennially sawdust-encrusted sculpture professor, who told my class, ‘You’ll know you’re a New Yorker when you have a dream where you discover another room in your apartment, through a closet, or behind a chest of drawers – if your subconscious is carving out legroom, you’re one of us.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“She deserves more credit for this. She’s just out there living her fiction.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“Everything is about sex, except sex.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People's Clothes

“The door of the bar swung open and a tangle of British ‘blokes’ sauntered through, stinking of Ryanair-pre-planned-pub-crawling.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“We had at this point spent many hours together and I was certain she was living vicariously through me, filling the void of her own existence with my answers and traumas,”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“The perks of this man’s creepiness are spectacular. Why would Claire be OK with you getting all this stuff?’ ‘She said she didn’t wear other people’s clothes – vintage.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“My computer was a wormhole back to America,”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes