Quote

Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.

Melissa Febos

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Even
Really
Never
Love
Celibate
Outside
Taught
Wonderful
Self

More quotes by Melissa Febos

Image
Letting go of the cozy stories you've been carrying around is devastating. But there's more room for new stuff after you do it.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
Image
Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.
Melissa Febos
Image
Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
Melissa Febos
Image
You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.
Melissa Febos
Image
Fiction stymies me with its possibility. I can't see the bottom and I freeze, cling to the side, or just choke. In nonfiction, particularly that which takes personal narrative for its primary topic, I have a finite space and a finite amount of material. I can't fabricate material, I can only shape and burrow into it.
Melissa Febos
Image
We often think that bad relationships are motivating by self-loathing or a wish for self-destruction, but I think that loving people who hurt us is more tied to a profound and earnest wish to soothe ourselves and recover from older hurts. And I've also found that having empathy for that urge is the best way to move through it, and beyond it.
Melissa Febos
Image
I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them it makes me want to hug them.
Melissa Febos
Image
All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
Melissa Febos
Image
I am secretive. Always have been. And one way that secrecy manifested in my early life was that I was adept at juggling multiple social realities: I could get by no problem in many social arenas (including that of high school), but also felt alienated and totally uninspired by everything that happened there.
Melissa Febos
Image
The other reason I didn't want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that I wanted to write about what had been a very lonely experience. The books that most saved my life as a kid were the ones that articulated lonely experiences that I had thought were mine alone.
Melissa Febos
Image
I do believe that we all have these stories inside of us, these scars that we compulsive worry as we do wounds, and that drive for redemption, to change the story or resolve it, governs a lot of what we do in love. We are irresistibly drawn to opportunities to reenact those traumas out of a desire to heal, not to punish ourselves.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
I have always trusted writers, books, thinkers, psychologists in figuring things out. Maybe because they don't know me, so they are always honest, if that makes sense. Their wisdom and counsel are always unconditional.
Melissa Febos
Image
The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
Melissa Febos
Image
I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.
Melissa Febos
Image
Anyone who makes a life of what they love is a hero to me, and it's important for those people to be visible in every kind of life, every kind of love, every kind of work.
Melissa Febos