Quote

I think that's the job of the writer, right? Not to introduce new ideas or feelings, but to name the ones we know most intimately but are afraid of speaking, or don't have the words. That's what I find most powerful anyway.

Melissa Febos

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Melissa Febos
Age: 44
Born: 1980
Born: September 28
Journalist
Writer
Thinking
Name
Intimately
Powerful
Introduce
Words
Introducing
Feelings
Anyway
Ideas
Speaking
Find
Afraid
Right
Ones
Think
Writer

More quotes by 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
You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.
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
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
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
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
All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.
Melissa Febos
Image
I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
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
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 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
Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.
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
I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.
Melissa Febos
Image
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
Image
Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.
Melissa Febos