Top 40 Melissa Bank Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time. There seems to be vast quantities of the stuff spooling around me in all directions, everywhere i look. Days and hours. Weeks and minutes. Years. The hard part, ive discovered, is filling it.”

— Melissa Bank

2. “It scares me. But then I get this big feeling, simple but exalted: He’s like me, just with different details.”

— Melissa Bank

3. “It might sound ordinary for a woman to find out her husband’s cheating on her, but not if you’re the woman and it’s your husband.”

— Melissa Bank

4. “Archie asked me if I knew Dante’s definition of hell... “Proximity without intimacy,” he said.”

— Melissa Bank

5. “While home is the place where you can relax and be yourself, this doesn’t mean that you can take advantage of the love and affection other members of your family have for you.”

— Melissa Bank

6. “I guess love is the real suspension of disbelief.”

— Melissa Bank

7. “You can feel that he wants to own you – not like an object but like a good dream he wants to keep having. He lets you know that you already own him.”

— Melissa Bank

8. “Basically, all anyone has to do is ask me for fun details or tell me to be creative, and my mind turns to mud. I am instantly the most boring person you’ve ever met.”

— Melissa Bank

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9. “Everywhere you go, you see women more beautiful than yourself. You imagine him being attracted to them. You’re drinking gasoline to stay warm.”

— Melissa Bank

10. “Finally, I asked how you got a boy to like you back. She said, ‘Just be yourself,’ as though I had any idea who that might be.”

— Melissa Bank

11. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

— Melissa Bank

12. “It’s perfectly natural to doubt your judgment about doubting your judgment.”

— Melissa Bank

13. “He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.”

— Melissa Bank

14. “She said that her father’s death had been the hardest thing in her life. “We are all children until our fathers die.”

— Melissa Bank

15. “Happiness is a dog sunning itself on a rock. We were not put on this Earth to be happy. We were put here to experience great things.”

— Melissa Bank

16. “He loves New York, he says. ‘It’s like Oberlin – it’s where people who don’t belong anywhere belong.”

— Melissa Bank

17. “He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.”

— Melissa Bank

18. “We are all children until our fathers die.”

— Melissa Bank

19. “I feel in some ways I’ve had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.”

— Melissa Bank

20. “The writing is clean. I really wouldn’t have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end.”

— Melissa Bank

21. “Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.”

— Melissa Bank

22. “The only relationships I haven’t wrecked right away were the ones that wrecked me later.”

— Melissa Bank

23. “When he takes off his shirt, I see that his shoulders are narrow and his chest almost hairless and almost concave. For a second I’m disappointed but right away I think, Grow up; this is the chest of a husband.”

— Melissa Bank

24. “I tried to avoid Mimi. Her presence seemed to call forth every rejection I’d ever experienced-the teachers who’d looked at me as though I held no promise, the boys who didn’t like me back. Around her, I became fourteen again.”

— Melissa Bank

25. “By late August, I’m on my second sublet, and I’ve been working as a copywriter long enough to know I’m not good at it. I seem to be reliving the life I had when I was twenty-two, but I’m about to run twenty-eight, which feels like the opposite of twenty-two.”

— Melissa Bank

26. “Oliver Biddle was who you became if you couldn’t find anyone to love except your parents.”

— Melissa Bank

27. “It scares me how fast I go from disliking to loving him, and I wonder if it’s this way for everyone.”

— Melissa Bank

28. “I live by Edith Whartons rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.”

— Melissa Bank

29. “Before college, I hadn’t voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn’t think I’d understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher’s interpretations of what we read.”

— Melissa Bank

30. “It occurred to me that the quiet in the suburbs had nothing to do with peace.”

— Melissa Bank

31. “He said, “People wait their whole lives for the kind of happiness we have.”

— Melissa Bank

32. “You see yourself through his eyes, as The Generic Woman, the skirted symbol of the ladies room door.”

— Melissa Bank

33. “I never expected anyone in my family to change, and especially not my father, who changed first and most profoundly: He died.”

— Melissa Bank

34. “I felt I couldn’t lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I’d lost the hope that I would ever be loved in just that way again.”

— Melissa Bank

35. “There are things that two people say in the middle of the night That don’t make sense to a third at breakfast.”

— Melissa Bank

36. “I hate weddings,′ she says. ‘They make me feel so unmarried. Actually, even brushing my teeth makes me feel unmarried.”

— Melissa Bank

37. “Nice,′ I say, realizing only afterward that I’ve mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I’m like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive.”

— Melissa Bank

38. “You try to plan your life, but that’s not how it works.”

— Melissa Bank

39. “You sense that he’s dangerous but don’t now why – and wonder if it’s because he makes you feel safer than you’ve ever felt.”

— Melissa Bank

40. “You have to shrink yourself to fit into this little life with him.”

— Melissa Bank

41. “Even now, remembering the sound of his voice chastens every word I say.”

— Melissa Bank

42. “He could do whatever he wanted. My father was the same way: a houseful of guests, and my mother’s duty was to provide food, drink, fun, and conversation, while my father’s was to nap or read.”

— Melissa Bank

43. “Whenever people say they didn’t like the main character of a book, they mean they didn’t like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don’t get that.”

— Melissa Bank

44. “We change into our bathing suits, both of us pale like larvae, and then we walk down to the water.”

— Melissa Bank

45. “I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching.”

— Melissa Bank

46. “The one I love the most is about two mayflies on a date; they watch a nature documentary about themselves and discover their life span is only one day long – after mating, they’ll die.”

— Melissa Bank

47. “In a cab home from a jazz club, he said, “You act like I just want to sleep with you.” He said, “I want to everything with you.”

— Melissa Bank