Melissa Febos Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I'm persuaded that sports is the one place where the rules are pretty well set out, where fans are equal. And if you got game or you're a good official, you make it here, whether you're white or you're black.

David Stern

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#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. 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

#12. People tell me, "Well, you understand where the voters are, Jeff, where the votes are, or what people are thinking," and they'll sort of - in a complimentary way. And it's a bit of an acknowledgement that we've been blind to some of these issues for too long.

Jeff Sessions

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

Melissa Febos

#14. I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.

Jacques Derrida

#15. Honest Winter, snow-clad, and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; But that long deferment of the calendar's promise, that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May how often has it robbed me of heart and hope?

George Gissing

#16. Let us bless thee at all times and forget not
how thou hast
forgiven our iniquities,
healed our diseases,
redeemed our lives from destruction,
crowned us with lovingkindness and
tender mercies,
satisfied our mouths with good things,
renewed our youth like the eagle's.

Arthur Bennett

#17. Somebody must always be doing something new, or life would get very dull.

Ninette De Valois

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

Melissa Febos

#19. 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

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

Melissa Febos

#21. 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

#22. Fortunately I am a mentally strong person and believe I will learn from the experience and continue to improve as a player and person because of it.
(on breaking his leg)

Michael Owen

#23. Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers.

Matt Haig

#24. She has a look," I said, "of not altogether belonging to today.

Robert Nathan

#25. Even if I had $200 million, I'm very wary of overusing CGI. I think it's a great tool and it can be used really effectively, but I feel like it does tend to be overused and especially in sci-fi stuff.

Rian Johnson

#26. Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems.

W. Edwards Deming

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. I took my father on a coach trip last summer.We were halfway there when the driver lost control of the coach, it flew down a hill around a bend and crashed through a brick wall. I wasn't hurt but luckily my father had the presence of mind to kick my head in.

Chic Murray

#30. Thirty-two years after the legalization of abortion by the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, the majority of Americans consider themselves pro-life.

Rick Santorum