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Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.

Melissa Febos

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Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Written
Came
Thought
Body
Ever
Things
Smart

More quotes by Melissa Febos

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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
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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
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I always wished I could go to confession. I was so full of things I couldn't name and had an instinct to hide. I felt burdened by the loneliness of my interior life. I wanted some container that I could empty myself into, some ear that would never be shocked, even if it offered me some kind of penance.
Melissa Febos
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I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
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I could not kick heroin to save my life, literally, until I started telling my secrets. It was some of the clearest evidence I've ever found of anything. It was the only immediate change in behavior I've ever undergone. I told the most frightening truths, and I was free.
Melissa Febos
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All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
Melissa Febos
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You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.
Melissa Febos
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Music isn't seeking to comment on the experience or transmit some finding about it - it is only seeking to express it. The vicarious experience is much more accessible. We all recognize the sound of that howling, because we all have a similar howling inside of us, however we heed it or hold it or muzzle it or repress it or live in bondage to it.
Melissa Febos
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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
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Children's stories force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.
Melissa Febos
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.
Melissa Febos
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The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
Melissa Febos