Latest Melissa Febos Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I think that's the job of the writer, right? Not to introduce new ideas or feelings, but to name the ones we know most intimately but are afraid of speaking, or don't have the words. That's what I find most powerful anyway.

  Melissa Febos

  Powerful, Thinking, Feelings

  Source: therumpus.net

• Maybe feeling of presence in my body is why I've always sought out extreme experiences; it forces me to be in a moment, to face the fact of my existing in that particular moment, in my body.

  Melissa Febos

  Feelings, Moments

  Source: therumpus.net

• I can only see right in front of me when I'm writing, you know? I never think of it as raw or personal or anything but where I'm at in the moment. But I can see it sort of after I finish.

  Melissa Febos

  Writing, Thinking, Moments

  Source: therumpus.net

• I always listen to music when I write! I basically make a playlist for every essay; sometimes it's just one song, or three songs, over and over and over. I sort of find the emotional pitch of the piece, and then match music to it, and then the music becomes a shortcut to the feeling, so I can enter it and work anywhere: on planes, cafes, at work, the train.

  Melissa Febos

  Song, Writing, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

• Letting go of the cozy stories you've been carrying around is devastating. But there's more room for new stuff after you do it.

  Melissa Febos

  Letting Go

  Source: therumpus.net

• I have always trusted writers, books, thinkers, psychologists in figuring things out. Maybe because they don't know me, so they are always honest, if that makes sense. Their wisdom and counsel are always unconditional.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Honest, Psychologist

  Source: therumpus.net

• Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.

  Melissa Febos

  Smart

  Source: therumpus.net

• I absolutely think that women told that writing about themselves is somehow not worthy enough for a public audience all the time. I hear it so often from my students and friends. As if it doesn't take rigorous craft, and intellectual acuity to write a slammin' book of any kind. But perhaps, especially, about the body.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.

  Melissa Febos

  Love Is, Wonderful

  Source: therumpus.net

• Behaviors and lifestyles that are classified as "normal" rarely get so generalized, public perception of heterosexual relationships, for instance, or of the "white" experience, allow for the infinite variety of experiences that exist under such headings, but people love to reduce the vastness of individuality and subjectivity within marginalized types of experience.

  Melissa Febos

  White, People, Perception

  Interview with Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

• I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.

  Melissa Febos

  Beautiful, One Thing

  Interview with Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

• S&M is just a set of practices that get classified as a single category, when more accurately they are a part of much larger set of behaviors: expressions of love, and self, and play, and even art. There is no hard line between "vanilla" sex and S&M sex, or any other kind of relation between people.

  Melissa Febos

  Art, Sex, Self

  Interview with Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

• Anyone who makes a life of what they love is a hero to me, and it's important for those people to be visible in every kind of life, every kind of love, every kind of work.

  Melissa Febos

  Hero, Love Is, People

  Interview With Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

• Early in my career as a domme, I both admired and feared becoming one of those career dommes. I saw, in myself, and in some other women in that industry, the way that sex work could eclipse the other parts of your personality, the way that I started to feel as if I wasn't qualified to do anything else. I had always known that I wanted to be a writer, and I stopped writing for a time while I was domming; the experience subsumed my other interests, and it scared me. Now, however, I have nothing but admiration for them.

  Melissa Febos

  Sex, Writing, Becoming One

  Interview With Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

• I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them; it makes me want to hug them.

  Melissa Febos

  People, Hug, Weakness

  Interview With Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

• You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

  Melissa Febos

  Writing, Maggie, Nelson

  Source: therumpus.net

• I've always looked very closely at people, and seen a lot; that was true even when I was a kid. That's what made me a good domme, but it's also what makes me well suited to being a writer, and a teacher.

  Melissa Febos

  Teacher, Kids, People

  Interview With Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

• Sometimes I see my students, especially the ones with a gift for the lyrical, reaching far outside the realm of their own experience for language and images. I understand this impulse. We think, in the beginning, that striking exotic words together will create something entirely new. That we must be worldly in our vocabulary. We idolize the styles of other writers and don't trust or perhaps yet know our own.

  Melissa Febos

  Thinking, Vocabulary, Style

  Source: therumpus.net

• The lovers enter into a story together - "this how we met, this is how we were meant for each other" - and then at some point (in my experience, at least), the story splits, and they no longer share it. Then, you either change the story, or you break up. I've always broken up.

  Melissa Febos

  Broken, Together, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

• All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.

  Melissa Febos

  Stories, Way, Invention

  Source: therumpus.net

• I think we all are born inside of our parents' narratives. We stay there for a good while. We are taught their narratives about everything: their marriage, the world, God, gender, identity, etcetera. Then, at some point, our own narrative develops too much integrity to live inside that story. We don't ever fully escape it, but we move into our own stories.

  Melissa Febos

  Integrity, Moving, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• When I was a kid, I was told that I had a biological father, but that he didn't have much importance. I had an adoptive father who was present, who loved me, who was up to the task. And he was. So, I didn't question that story, until I was thirty-two, and suddenly realized that I was curious, that he did have something to do with me.

  Melissa Febos

  Father, Kids, Two

  Source: therumpus.net

• Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.

  Melissa Febos

  Long, Narrative, Our Lives

  Source: therumpus.net

• At a glance, addiction, sex work, mad passion, and all forms of extreme behavior might look like pushing or trying to obliterate boundaries when, more honestly, they are a search for them. I want to find the endpoint, the place where my own powers end, so I can yield to something that I'm certain is bigger than me.

  Melissa Febos

  Sex, Passion, Yield

  Source: therumpus.net

• Children's stories force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.

  Melissa Febos

  Children, Mirrors, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net