Top 150 Melissa Broder Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I believe in love more than anything. But I think I am very bad at it.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

103. “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

104. “I felt most Jewish when my grandparents, also Reform but deeply obsessed with Jewish food, would drive me to New York and take me on a tour of all the old culinary haunts of our tribe.”

— Melissa Broder

105. “I’d entered therapy hoping to alleviate the suffering related to both my food issues and my mother, but without having to make any actual life changes in either area.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

107. “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

108. “This was the thing about boundaries: they made sense in therapy, but when you tried to implement them in the real world, people had no idea what you were talking about. Or, deep down they knew exactly what you were talking about and immediately set to work reinforcing their case of denial.”

— Melissa Broder

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Melissa Broder

112. “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

113. “The cactus laughs in silence. Unlike the rocks, I have no voice for it.”

— Melissa Broder

114. “It’s always the people you don’t want to be there for you who are there for you.”

— Melissa Broder

115. “I didn’t need to be or do anything more than simply exist for them to love me. It was as though they loved my naked soul, some inner essence, with an unconditional love.”

— Melissa Broder

116. “Something about self-soothing, offering up compassion for the young Rachel who lived inside of me. But I hated that young Rachel.”

— Melissa Broder

117. “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

118. “I had no idea how to be a mom, let alone my own mother. But what about daughterhood? Was it possible that I could be my own daughter? This seemed more doable. I wondered if the universe, in its roundness, somehow already contained my daughterness. Perhaps I’d been being held there, a daughter all along, until I woke up to it. If I could not be my own mother – or at least not the kind of mother worth having – then maybe I could be my own daughter.”

— Melissa Broder

119. “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

120. “I came to the desert because I wanted to be alone. Now that I’m alone, it’s not what I want.”

— Melissa Broder

121. “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

122. “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

123. “There was total silence now on my mother’s end, no communication. Still, I carried her inside me: her voice, her feelings, her fears, her ideas of food, bodies, the world, women and men. She had long ago implanted herself in me at the cellular level, spread into my organs – my brain, my heart – until what was her and what was mine were indistinguishable.”

— Melissa Broder

124. “What did it mean to love something so much and also be wrong about it? What did it mean to love a version of something that might not really exist – not as you saw it? Did this negate the love? Was the love still real?”

— Melissa Broder

125. “Whenever I try to emotionally connect with my mother, she acts like I’m crazy to think she has feelings to express. It makes me self-conscious of my own sensitivity, like anything resembling a feeling is dramatic, frivolous, unnecessary.”

— Melissa Broder

126. “No perfect words. No words at all. How strange that there is nothing I can say to make him love me more. Nothing I can say to make him love me less.”

— Melissa Broder

127. “I’d thought about getting a rug, but I couldn’t commit. I felt that committing to a rug would mean I existed on the planet more than I actually wanted to exist.”

— Melissa Broder

128. “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

129. “What did she look like?” I asked him. “Uh – ” he faltered. “Would you say she’s better-looking than me?” “Ma’am,” said the cop, “I’m going to strongly recommend that you seek help for your anger issues.”

— Melissa Broder

130. “How can I want my husband when he’s always right there? To want what you have. It’s like a puzzle. But people seem to do it all the time.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

133. “My father the grown-up, my father the child. We are falling into the sunset. Falling into the night sky. Maybe the night sky is kind. Forgiving. We have both been forgiven a thousand times. Being human, always new things to forgive. Forgive me, father. You are already forgiven. Forgive me, daughter. There’s nothing to forgive.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

135. “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

136. “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

137. “The silent times were the hardest. That was when I had to mourn... I didn’t want to accept my loss – not only the loss of communication, but the loss of an idea that my mother was going to be the one to change. It made me feel like a loser. It meant I had wanted something and hadn’t gotten it, that I’d been, in some way, rejected. It meant my needs were too big for this world.”

— Melissa Broder

138. “This is the problem with human relationships: you come to a person with one feeling and they’re having another.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

140. “I’m perfectly content to eat by myself in public, so long as the restaurant is crowded. There’s solitude in a crowd.”

— Melissa Broder

141. “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

142. “People are such a commitment. I would “reach out” more often if everyone promised not to check in again later.”

— Melissa Broder

143. “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

144. “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

145. “It was like I’d spent my entire life trying to get honey and then trying to avoid it. I wondered what I would have done with all that life if it hadn’t been defined like that. The freedom seemed enormous, monstrous.”

— Melissa Broder

146. “If I’m honest, I came to escape a feeling – an attempt that’s already going poorly, because unfortunately I’ve brought myself with me, and I see, as the last pink light creeps out to infinity, that I am still the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me.”

— Melissa Broder

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

— Melissa Broder

148. “If I saw no humour in my unraveling, I’d have been dead long ago.”

— Melissa Broder

149. “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

150. “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