34 Quotes by Melissa Febos

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.