Top 60 Melissa Febos Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I want to tell her that darkness is not bad. It is only the place we can’t see yet.”

— Melissa Febos

2. “Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.”

— Melissa Febos

3. “It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.”

— Melissa Febos

4. “Our favorite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.”

— Melissa Febos

5. “You don’t leave out of anger or from coming to your senses, but because your love is not as strong as your reasons for going.”

— Melissa Febos

6. “I’m always writing to a younger version of myself, or a young woman who is like I was. I want that girl to know that I really existed and that it all went down that way.”

— Melissa Febos

7. “When we observe how the world affects us and let our defenses rest, when we consider the context of our greater history, we have an opportunity to act from our higher selves and perceptions. Not reacting gives us the agency to change.”

— Melissa Febos

8. “The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one’s own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.”

— Melissa Febos

9. “You don’t know how people are going to respond. But I would add to that, that getting your heart broken is not the worst thing and it’s actually quite unavoidable. I think in some ways I had to break my father’s heart and then face that in order to have a real relationship with him.”

— Melissa Febos

10. “I was a girl gulping a woman’s grief.”

— Melissa Febos

11. “The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in – or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.”

— Melissa Febos

12. “New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.”

— Melissa Febos

13. “Such is the disconcerting miracle of good acting; at its best it implicitly challenges our faith in who we are, who anyone is.”

— Melissa Febos

14. “I never think about anything in my brain. I think in very small repetitive circles inside my own brain. That’s why I’m a writer. It’s the only way I get any sort of conclusion or understanding about anything.”

— Melissa Febos

15. “Daisy Miller dies of Roman fever. Nana Coupeau dies of smallpox. Ophelia dies by drowning herself. Tess Durbeyfield dies by execution. Emma Bovary dies by swallowing arsenic. Anna Karenina dies by throwing herself under a train. I did not die.”

— Melissa Febos

16. “My mother relates to the world through a permeable membrane. She can imagine herself in a different life and has recast herself many times. As I have. It is a way to move through the world driven equally by hope and fear. We who fear abandonment are often the most capable of leaving. We build lives out of moveable pieces. Out of ourselves. It is a creative way to live, both variable and resilient, if sometimes lonely.”

— Melissa Febos

17. “Abandonment. What did that really mean? That I was left? That I had learned to leave my self. That I would retell the story until I found a different ending. Until I learned to stay.”

— Melissa Febos

18. “When we don’t react, something creative happens. She meant that we get to fully experience what happens. When we observe how the world affects us and let our defenses rest, when we consider the context of our greater history, we have an opportunity to act from our higher selves and perceptions. Not reacting gives us the agency to change. Or, in.”

— Melissa Febos

19. “I tell my students all the time is, for better or worse, no publisher is going to come wrench your story out of your hands before you’re ready to let it go. You will have time to take stuff out. You don’t have to show it to anybody. That’s what I did.”

— Melissa Febos

20. “Maybe that’s all bravery is: when your hunger is greater than your fear. I resist the implication that bravery is noble. I must face the things that scare me in order to survive. And survival is not noble. It is not a sacrifice of self but in service to the self.”

— Melissa Febos

21. “I did not choose my female body. But I chose every image painted on it.”

— Melissa Febos

22. “How often we set this trap for ourselves. I had learned to act as if I were the person I wished to be: an ascetically self-sufficient woman, a woman without needs, a woman immune to disappointment. And I found or urged myself to be attracted to people whom only such a woman should love.”

— Melissa Febos

23. “When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, “Novels,” and she said, “You should be writing them then.” Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.”

— Melissa Febos

24. “Sometimes pain is the call of a wound that needs tending, and sometimes it is the sting of its healing.”

— Melissa Febos

25. “I only wanted to know where I ended and everything else began, and I still do, in these oceanic days.”

— Melissa Febos

26. “I want the people I love to do not as I would or have done, but whatever will keep them safe.”

— Melissa Febos

27. “We find ways to comfort one another and to comfort ourselves. And comfort eases, but it does not erase. Until then, we keep reading.”

— Melissa Febos

28. “The work of love is in building a shared story, and in letting the differences in perception rest easily aside one another.”

— Melissa Febos

29. “It quickly became apparent to me that embodied writing is not in opposition to political writing. In fact, it is the kind of political writing that I am most interested in reading.”

— Melissa Febos

30. “There are still times when he and I fall into our respective labyrinths. I no longer believe that anyone but ourselves can lead us out. The Minotaurs we need to rescue are never our half brothers. They are always those monstrous parts of ourselves. We can never even know for certain that we are free. The best we can offer each other, and ourselves, is a few honest words.”

— Melissa Febos

31. “We really want the undoing of our earliest wounds and sometimes, in our attempts to correct the errors of our childhoods, we choose the exact thing we hope to avoid. We recognize a chance for love’s redemption and run toward it. We hope for a different ending.”

— Melissa Febos

32. “The more we want to exploit a body, the less humanity we allow it.”

— Melissa Febos

33. “At the end, when I had descended so far beyond the bare fact of myself that it was no longer escaped, but lost, I’d whisper into my cupped hand, Melissa. A caught bee, its familiar hum held to my ear. Melissa. I wanted to go home. I wanted a new word for help.”

— Melissa Febos

34. “Call it grace, call it survival, call it strength – whatever allowed me to seize that moment of clarity and insist that what I was searching for was not in any cloistered room. It is something that my brother and I were given by our parents and the ways that they loved us. It is a fundamental belief in the worth of one’s own life. It is the knowledge of true love, and the belief that we are capable givers and receivers of it.”

— Melissa Febos

35. “My poor body. My precious body. How had I let her be treated this way? My body was me. To hate my own body was to suffer from an autoimmune disease of the mind.”

— Melissa Febos

36. “Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.”

— Melissa Febos

37. “True love is not the reward for a successful campaign to domesticate oneself. It is the thing I was practicing all of those years ago, in my own constructive play. It is entering the woods a stranger, shaking loose the stories assigned you, and naming the world as you meet it, together.”

— Melissa Febos

38. “Nature isn’t cruel, but unconcerned with human frailty.”

— Melissa Febos

39. “By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter divorced parent, I accepted that our collaboration was mandatory. I needed her and hated her all the more for it.”

— Melissa Febos

40. “I forgive myself for ingesting shame I did not choose but was fed anyway,” says Aja. “I may not yet be unashamed, but I am wholly unapologetic.”

— Melissa Febos

41. “My desire was a galloping thing, and her touch, unlike that of boys, didn’t snuff it out. If my body had been a passive machine from which men made withdrawals, like an ATM whose code they were handed on the day of their first erection, then with her it was a winning slot machine, screaming jangly music and spewing coins.”

— Melissa Febos

42. “I am that careless girl, hands sunk haphazardly into the dough, bedroom a sty, pen stilled against her hand, eyes cast out the window, humming a song, thinking of something else. I am that outspoken witch; I will disagree with any man. I am a firework gone off in the dark, a spectacle of disobedience, a grand finale of orgasms anytime I want.”

— Melissa Febos

43. “Now those moments seem proof that self-love is an instinct, as animal as any other function of the self. The ferocity of my affection could not be erased, only suppressed under total vigilance. My self-hatred was not self-generated. It was an expression of the environment outside of my body, which, it eventually turned out, I could change.”

— Melissa Febos

44. “I had learned about the male gaze in women’s studies classes, but knew no way to dig it out of me.”

— Melissa Febos

45. “A secret is anathema to believing love is true. A kernel of promise that if the past is exposed, love will abandon her. What a terrible predicament, to not know if love is conditional, and yet, to understand that the only way to find out is to risk losing it.”

— Melissa Febos

46. “It is through the collaboration of all these factors, of course, that patriarchy is enforced: an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently inside their own minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own jewelry.”

— Melissa Febos

47. “Say the ape, the Eurasian magpie, or the elephant looks in the mirror and recognizes the paint smeared on her body by the researcher. The animal who passes the mirror test then investigates her own body for the offending mark. Say she finds nothing. How long before she trusts the reflection over her own body? Say the mark on her reflection is confirmed by all the other elephants. How long before her reflection replaces herself? Say the mark is not of paint but instead a word applied to her.”

— Melissa Febos

48. “There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”

— Melissa Febos

49. “Not all men! cry the good ones. They don’t want to be feared, so it is our job to fix our fear. That is, sure, being a woman who gets assaulted and fears it at every turn sucks, but it’s not as bad as getting your feelings hurt. It is the job of women to caretake the feelings of good men, even at the cost of our own safety. We are trained from birth to accommodate them and their uncontrollable urges.”

— Melissa Febos

50. “Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a timeworn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention-grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.”

— Melissa Febos