34 Quotes by Melissa Febos

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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