Top 120 Melissa Broder Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “But it was better to stay in bed and dream of her than to be together in a realm where we had to pretend that physically we were strangers to each other.”

— Melissa Broder

103. “Simply being alive was not enough. The Greeks needed a new fantasy to make the world more exciting. With their war, wine, poetry, gods, and food, they needed to get high. Maybe we all did.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

105. “But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either?”

— Melissa Broder

106. “I had always felt culturally Jewish, even though I wasn’t religious. But now in my ignorance of Orthodox customs I felt like a straight-up WASP. In some ways I liked that feeling: streamlined, self-contained.”

— Melissa Broder

107. “Nothing is beautiful and everything is nothing,” I said to him. “Everything is nothing and everything is beautiful.” I had no idea what I was talking about but I felt hypnotized with joy and potentiality.”

— Melissa Broder

108. “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

109. “I realized how much time I had spent with Jamie. Or maybe not how much time I’d spent with him, but how much time I spent alone but knowing, at least, that he was there. It was different now, being totally alone, with no one person in the back of my mind – that little figure, like a cushion.”

— Melissa Broder

110. “I didn’t know how people could stand it, the regular interactions, conscious dating, trying to pass as normal or interesting. Nobody was that interesting and certainly no one was normal.”

— Melissa Broder

111. “Funny,” he said. “You’re like a little death.” “What?” I asked. “You are. You’re... gloomy yet charming. I like it.” “Well, no on has said that before.” “You’re gently death-ish. You know about death, you’re aware of it, and most people aren’t anymore. But you’re not a killer. You’re a soft darkness.” A soft darkness.”

— Melissa Broder

112. “I imagined googling, How to make a golem fall in love with you. Maybe that’s all that prayer was anyway – a cosmic google. In that case, any iPhone could be a synagogue. I wished I could FaceTime with Rabbi Judah.”

— Melissa Broder

113. “I also recognized that I was physically attracted to her.”

— Melissa Broder

114. “All that mattered was what I ate, when I ate, and how I ate it.”

— Melissa Broder

115. “But if Adam wanted me, there were others who would want me, maybe many others, even some who didn’t read Bukowski.”

— Melissa Broder

116. “I felt silly asking to enjoy my life. I wondered if this was more than any human being should ask. Did anyone ever say that life was to be enjoyed and not suffered?”

— Melissa Broder

117. “If they had tasted the nausea of not knowing why we are here or who we are, or if they had not, now they were willfully and successfully ignoring it. Or maybe they were just stupid. Oh, the sweet gift of stupidity.”

— Melissa Broder

118. “This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.”

— Melissa Broder

119. “This interplay between hope and reality was also a part of the mourning.”

— Melissa Broder

120. “I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt.”

— Melissa Broder

121. “I was to keep going, to move forward on the same track in spite of life’s unsatisfying lifeness.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

123. “Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito.”

— Melissa Broder

124. “Those highs, even if they were fake and we knew that they wouldn’t last forever, felt so real when we were in them. That’s where I was now. I just couldn’t discern the ephemeral nature of what I was experiencing, and didn’t want to. Perhaps what I had with Theo was as synthetic as what Claire had with her men, but it felt so good- how could we ever even care when we were in it?”

— Melissa Broder

125. “I decided that love is when you have food in your mouth that you know is not going to make you fat. Lust is when you have food in your mouth that is going to make you fat. Fear is the day after you had food in your mouth that is going to make you fat.”

— Melissa Broder

126. “I wanted to negate myself somehow, as if you could just sign up to vanish. As if you could sign up to really be alive, but as someone else.”

— Melissa Broder

127. “Maybe we can kiss.”

— Melissa Broder

128. “Why can’t people just be kind to one another? But what I really meant was, why can’t I be kind to myself?”

— Melissa Broder

129. “Gods, please help me to be happy. Let me do the will of the universe and be willing to do the will of the universe, whatever that even is. Clearly I know very little. Clearly what I think I know leads me only to a place of suicidal longing. I never asked to be born on the planet. I never asked to exist. But I am here now so could you maybe at least try and help me enjoy my life?”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

131. “At times I’d felt courageous on the journey, but it was borrowed courage. Now we were here, and neither of us had a plan. Was she going to abandon me, leave me stranded in my body? I’d be in exile with a stomach that demanded more of everything.”

— Melissa Broder

132. “What if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right?”

— Melissa Broder