Top 120 Melissa Broder Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it – a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.”

— Melissa Broder

52. “I’ve been on your FB page for five hours today: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

53. “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

54. “I guess you aren’t going to rescue me from my life: a love story.”

— Melissa Broder

55. “Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?”

— Melissa Broder

56. “But unfortunately, I’m forced to be a grown-up in life. On the internet I’m still sixteen.”

— Melissa Broder

57. “I’m always scared that every feeling is going to be permanent.”

— Melissa Broder

58. “There aren’t many ways to find comfort in this world. We must take it where we can get it, even in the darkest, most disgusting places. Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, You have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that 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. It’s your fault we’re here to deal with the void in the first place.”

— Melissa Broder

59. “I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it – when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer.”

— Melissa Broder

60. “What I have sought in love is a reprieve from the itch of consciousness – to transcend myself and my human imperfections – but this has yet to happen.”

— Melissa Broder

61. “I feel bad for using the world old as synonymous with bad. Where did I learn that to look old as a woman is bad? Maybe I learned it, like, everywhere.”

— Melissa Broder

62. “Did anyone ever say that life was to be enjoyed and not suffered? What if the suffering was the point? But I didn’t want to suffer anymore. I couldn’t take it. That was clear. So I was going to try to be happy, even if it brought me more suffering.”

— Melissa Broder

63. “I was very boys club, very not attached.”

— Melissa Broder

64. “At the same time, I still can’t come to terms with the fact that I am actually, definitely going to die one day, as this might lead to the realization that I might as well enjoy my one brief life, and who wants that.”

— Melissa Broder

65. “You gave me only drops of what I want.”

— Melissa Broder

66. “Was this how it was with all men? Did they all exist in a totally different reality – one in which you couldn’t ask certain questions or the spell would be broken?”

— Melissa Broder

67. “Feelings were a luxory of the young, or someone much stronger than me – someone more at ease with being human.”

— Melissa Broder

68. “I’d been wrong about death... There was no gentle escape. When I had taken those Ambien in Phoenix I thought there was a peaceful way to just kind of disappear. But death wasn’t gentle. It was a robber. It stole you out of yourself, and you became a husk.”

— Melissa Broder

69. “I lap your milk of illness up It nurtures my dying.”

— Melissa Broder

70. “I loved him too. But at the same time, who knew what love was exactly? I still didn’t have it figured out. I remembered what Dr. Jude had said. The question is not what is love, but is it really love I’m looking for?”

— Melissa Broder

71. “I am a vanity eater, a machinelike eater, a suppresser-of-feels eater.”

— Melissa Broder

72. “For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet you anxiety.”

— Melissa Broder

73. “Weight Watchers points is a beautiful system for someone who is absentminded about food. They aren’t the greatest for someone who has had eating disorders all her life. The world became numbers to me and I was doing more math than I ever had before. I got off Weight Watchers and went back to just counting calories. The world became different kinds of numbers, the old, familiar kind. This is how I eat now. The world is still numbers, but it is algebra, not calculus.”

— Melissa Broder

74. “Though our minds try to tell a different story.”

— Melissa Broder

75. “What I am saying is doomed:.”

— Melissa Broder

76. “I was still melting down. But New York – unlike San Francisco – had a stable ground on which to hit bottom.”

— Melissa Broder

77. “I was wearing the same black dress that I had worn with Adam. I had like it so much when I got it, but now that it was no longer new it didn’t feel good enough. Now that I had owned it for more than a minute it had gotten some of me on it.”

— Melissa Broder

78. “I liked these echoes of the past, the way a food could rouse a memory from death.”

— Melissa Broder

79. “I feel bad that I don’t identify with the purity of babies.”

— Melissa Broder

80. “There was something nice about being forced to be done with everything by sunset, to be excused from life. It was like a teacher’s note from the ultimate authority.”

— Melissa Broder

81. “I felt like I was dying. I woud say to myself, You felt like you were dying yesterday. But you didn’t die. So even though you feel like you are dying today, you probably won’t die.”

— Melissa Broder

82. “The heart so ready before it existed.”

— Melissa Broder

83. “I moaned some more, not altogether fake, because I enjoyed hearing myself. But fake in the sense that I knew I was suddenly too self-conscious to be aroused.”

— Melissa Broder

84. “It would be like cutting off my head because of a headache. But I was so tired of my head.”

— Melissa Broder

85. “Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. 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

86. “This was what I needed – multiple men at all times. Then I wouldn’t need any of them. Put me naked in a clamshell. Let them all fawn around me.”

— Melissa Broder

87. “It was as though they loved my naked soul, some inner essence, with an unconditional love.”

— Melissa Broder

88. “My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.”

— Melissa Broder

89. “I felt that our kissing could sustain the ritual of women loving women for eons to come.”

— Melissa Broder

90. “What about holding hands in a movie theater? Can girls hold hands in a movie theater?”

— Melissa Broder

91. “What was a person supposed to do with herself in life? Maybe we did need spiritual guidance. No wonder I’d turned to the elliptical machine.”

— Melissa Broder

92. “The kitchen was a ’60s wood-paneling affair, with a linoleum floor, yellow countertops, and every inch of wall space covered in oak cabinets.”

— Melissa Broder

93. “But love, lust, infatuation, for a few moments, I was not sad.”

— Melissa Broder

94. “Mythical creatures were born and died all the time. They were born when we needed them and they died when we no longer saw them through the same eyes.”

— Melissa Broder

95. “You had to never get attached to any other person or expect anything good to come to you, and that was how you fell in love with life and how maybe certain fun and good things could happen to you. They only happened as long as you didn’t need anything from anyone. As long as you didn’t take anything from anyone or give any part of yourself away to another person, but you just sort of met the other person in space, good things could happen. You had to fall in love with quiet first.”

— Melissa Broder

96. “The heart gets wounded – so what? I thought. I’d seen all the plays. I should have been prepared. Love goes. But what I hadn’t known was how good the love would feel when it was there, like a hymn moving through me all the time.”

— Melissa Broder

97. “I have a vested interest in keeping things under control, because when I lose my illusions of control I get very scared. The world is scary enough as it is.”

— Melissa Broder

98. “Better to adapt to the cold. Better to thrust the cold on oneself. Be prepared.”

— Melissa Broder

99. “I believe in love more than anything. But I think I am very bad at it.”

— Melissa Broder

100. “Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to need, even if you risked rejection.”

— Melissa Broder