Top 120 Melissa Broder Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Once a cucumber turns into a pickle, you can’t turn it back into a cucumber. And I’ve been pickled by the internet for a long time.”

— Melissa Broder

2. “I am a superficial woman of depth.”

— Melissa Broder

3. “I fear others will discover that I am not only imperfect; I’m not even okay. I fear that I truly am not okay. But most people who meet me never know that I am struggling. On the outside I am smiling. I am juggling all the balls of okayness: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, existential. Underneath, I am suffocating.”

— Melissa Broder

4. “Like, I just want to be okay in this world. I don’t trust myself to find that okayness alone. I guess I don’t really trust the universe to give it to me, either. I want to know exactly where my next peace of mind is coming from. And it feels good to know that something has my back, even if it makes my life really small and might kill me.”

— Melissa Broder

5. “You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”

— Melissa Broder

6. “We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together in my head: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

7. “I wanted to build a fire with our shadow selves and burn there or be erased by the narcotic of limerence when I turned your face into a fire: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

8. “I would say I’m less afraid of dying than I am of life.”

— Melissa Broder

9. “I think it’s time for you to drop back into my life, ruin it, then disappear again: a love story. The.”

— Melissa Broder

10. “They say the perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you strive for perfection you will overlook the good. But I did not agree. I didn’t like the good. The good was just mediocre. I wanted to go beyond mediocre. I wanted to be exceptional. I did not want to be medium-size. I wanted to be perfect. And by perfect, I meant less.”

— Melissa Broder

11. “You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub.”

— Melissa Broder

12. “The anxiety of the sexual act is my sexual act: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

13. “Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even just for a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high – no longer be a drug – and that was why you grew tired of them.”

— Melissa Broder

14. “I’m in love with you and you don’t want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

15. “I feel bad about my deeper, underlying reasons for judging people with children. I judge them as a defense mechanism, because I am sad about my motivations for not having kids. I am self-centered and dysmorphic with low self-esteem.”

— Melissa Broder

16. “The Internet has gotten me off of email. The iPhone has gotten me off the laptop. If the laptop is cocaine, the iPhone is crack. And I take these hits of crack before, during, and after everything.”

— Melissa Broder

17. “Also, the silence is always there. The silence doesn’t go away.”

— Melissa Broder

18. “What happens to the space that two people occupied together? How can it just disappear? Why can’t it just become something else?”

— Melissa Broder

19. “If I do not believe that I as a woman deserve pizza, what does that say of my views of other women?”

— Melissa Broder

20. “When you’re lonely and blacking out in strange places, you let other lonely people do what they want to you. You call it free love.”

— Melissa Broder

21. “Just saw two ants drown together in my bathtub and it reminded me of us: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

22. “In the dark you looked so human in your skin that I called you human in my head and didn’t want you then and felt relieved: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

23. “I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn’t even want to have to feel them myself.”

— Melissa Broder

24. “I feel bad about my struggle, because it is nothing compared to other people’s struggles and yet it still hurts.”

— Melissa Broder

25. “Men could smell an opening and they could smell a closing.”

— Melissa Broder

26. “Our single friends say they are going to be alone for the rest of their lives and we tell them they are crazy. We tell them they are definitely going to find someone. But how do we know? We know nothing.”

— Melissa Broder

27. “I claim to believe my god exists, because I have experienced its presence many times. I have experienced god through other human beings who have helped me. While individuals have let me down, collectively I’ve always been able to help.”

— Melissa Broder

28. “Maybe that’s all that prayer was anyway – a cosmic google. In that case, any iPhone could be a synagogue.”

— Melissa Broder

29. “Text me back: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

30. “I feel like my life has a lot of caves and they are all filled with your hair: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

31. “Let’s pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

32. “I didn’t like myself enough to suck my own tits.”

— Melissa Broder

33. “On the Ace roof there was flamenco music playing, or bossa nova or something. It all seemed so contemporary and pleasant. The sun was setting and I ordered a white wine. Was this how everything was now? Just nice? I wondered if other people felt comfortable within niceness, or whether they didn’t even notice that things were nice. Maybe they expected everything to be nice. Maybe nice was like air to them.”

— Melissa Broder

34. “In the context of food and consumption, too-muchness translates into not-enoughness: your appetites are too big for the planet, and therefore, you probably shouldn’t be here.”

— Melissa Broder

35. “I’d owned enough New Age tchotchkes in my lifetime to know that within a few days of purchase they just seemed like more crap. But as you were shopping, sifting through the stones and their meanings, there was hope that this was a turning point. It was the velocity of buying something that was the high, the potentiality of it. I could capitalist-believe in magic.”

— Melissa Broder

36. “My god is a horizontal god who works sideways on earth rather than vertically from heaven down.”

— Melissa Broder

37. “I chew the gum, because I don’t trust the universe to fill me up on its own. I can’t count on the universe to sate my many holes: physical, emotional, spiritual. So I take matters into my own hands. I give myself little “doggy treats” for being alive.”

— Melissa Broder

38. “It’s probably good tha I keep pushing myself to leave the house and maintan my social masks of competence, engagement, and comfort. But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me?”

— Melissa Broder

39. “I don’t watch a lot of porn, but a typical search term for me is “fat lesbians.” What a beautiful fantasy: to be accepted and embraced and adored as your biggest self, the most you, by a woman who is her fullest her.”

— Melissa Broder

40. “When something real has to be done, like making the bed or paying a bill, I feel like it is going to kill me. Like, I feel that a cruel and oppressive mother is coming for me and the world is comprised of nothing but Sisyphean tasks, wherein you infinitely push a boulder up a hill and are infinitely crushed.”

— Melissa Broder

41. “Babies are born because parents feel they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours.”

— Melissa Broder

42. “The basement was already prepared for me. A sofa bed had been pulled out and made up with a soft pink-and-green blanket, old but comfortable. Everything was like that in this house: soft, old, and comfortable. It reminded me that for some people life was about the tactile, about relaxation, about feeling good. This could be the Schwebels’ rhetorical motto: Why wouldn’t you take three pillows? Why wouldn’t you use an extra blanket? Why wouldn’t you just be comfortable?”

— Melissa Broder

43. “Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren’t on Twitter.”

— Melissa Broder

44. “I chew the gum, because I don’t trust the universe to fill me up on its own.”

— Melissa Broder

45. “I wake up scared and I’m scared all day. I’m scared of being scared. Scared of “losing it”. Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home – that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.”

— Melissa Broder

46. “I liked the Beats for a second when I was fourteen. By sixteen I realized they were mostly just good for picking out a douchebag. There was something about douche bros and the Beats. They just gravitated there.”

— Melissa Broder

47. “Maybe we do better when we see each other simply as beloveds.”

— Melissa Broder

48. “But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me? Would I end up jobless, friendless, and loveless? Would I vanish entirely?”

— Melissa Broder

49. “There I was, a woman on the rocks by the ocean, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the return of her lover. Everything I knew about art would say that I was a painting. I was certainly a poem. Sappho was too – her life, perhaps, unknowable, but her feelings were mine. I was mythic.”

— Melissa Broder

50. “There was a love that had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were propagating that love. It was radiating out of my apartment windows, through the city, across the canyons, over the hills, and into the night sky.”

— Melissa Broder