Melissa Febos Quotes

#1. The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.

Melissa Febos

#2. How often we set this trap for ourselves. I had learned to act as if I were the person I wished to be: an ascetically self-sufficient woman, a woman without needs, a woman immune to disappointment. And I found or urged myself to be attracted to people whom only such a woman should love.

Melissa Febos

#3. You don't know how people are going to respond. But I would add to that, that getting your heart broken is not the worst thing and it's actually quite unavoidable. I think in some ways I had to break my father's heart and then face that in order to have a real relationship with him.

Melissa Febos

#4. I want the people I love to do not as I would or have done, but whatever will keep them safe.

Melissa Febos

#5. Such is the disconcerting miracle of good acting; at its best it implicitly challenges our faith in who we are, who anyone is.

Melissa Febos

#6. Sometimes pain is the call of a wound that needs tending, and sometimes it is the sting of its healing.

Melissa Febos

#7. It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.

Melissa Febos

#8. That is the gift of taking the long road: you know you're not missing anything.

Melissa Febos

#9. The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one's own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.

Melissa Febos

#10. We find ways to comfort one another and to comfort ourselves. And comfort eases, but it does not erase. Until then, we keep reading.

Melissa Febos

#11. When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

Melissa Febos

#12. I'm always writing to a younger version of myself, or a young woman who is like I was. I want that girl to know that I really existed and that it all went down that way.

Melissa Febos

#13. I never think about anything in my brain. I think in very small repetitive circles inside my own brain. That's why I'm a writer. It's the only way I get any sort of conclusion or understanding about anything.

Melissa Febos

#14. Our favorite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.

Melissa Febos

#15. There is a moment in your 20s when you know what it means to love rightly, but not how to do it, and then you begin to learn.

Melissa Febos

#16. I tell my students all the time is, for better or worse, no publisher is going to come wrench your story out of your hands before you're ready to let it go. You will have time to take stuff out. You don't have to show it to anybody. That's what I did.

Melissa Febos

#17. New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.

Melissa Febos