Abandon Me Quotes

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“We all craft a story we can live with. The one that makes ourselves easier to live with. This is not the one worth writing. To write your story, you must face a truer version of it. You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you. That do not spare you the trouble of knowing what made you, and what into. I used to wonder if my own difficulty in doing this made me a hypocrite. Now, I'm not sure I believe in hypocrites. We often prescribe for others the thing we most need. It is part of how we learn.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“I only wanted to know where I ended and everything else began, and I still do, in these oceanic days.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“I did not choose my female body. But I chose every image painted on it.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“I want to tell her that darkness is not bad. It is only the place we can't see yet.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me

“I know the impossibility of the hickey, whose urge is not ultimately to mark or to be marked, but to possess and be possessed. I cannot render anything precisely in words, as I cannot crush my lover's body inside of mine. All I can do is leave a mark--the notation of my effort, a symbol for the thing. That is the endless pleasure and frustration of the writer and the lover: to reach and reach and never become.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“I want the people I love to do not as I would or have done, but whatever will keep them safe.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror / Just keep going. No feeling is final / Don’t let yourself lose me.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

“The work of love is in building a shared story, and in letting the differences in perception rest easily aside one another.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“It is a violent way to emerge, to tell a secret.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“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, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“We invent nothing. We are in constant collaboration with our contexts. We are more alike than we think.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“Even those ancient monks, writers of the Philokalia, believed that the repetition of words, and willingness, was all one needed. Faith could be summoned in the self, in saying, in the body. One didn’t need to believe in God to walk toward God. I only had to believe in a word. So I started looking for”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

“The labyrinth, after all, is Sarah's creation. She calls upon the Goblin King. And this is the biggest difference between my brother's afflictions and mine: whatever the biological and historical factors, I still chose mine.... Like her, there was only one person I needed to save: myself.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“We all carry a small catalog of unsealable wounds. Maybe these breaches of conscience that retain their power to sear are necessary reminders of our own boundaries. We touch them to remember. To prevent future transgression. But no sting compares to this one. It carved something out of me. A space that filled with the shocking light of how much I could hurt the person I least wanted to. It was the first love that made sense of the word "tender," which refers not only to a gentle feeling, but to the ache and vulnerability of loving someone. Which is not the same thing as protecting them.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“He did not crush gold cans of Presidente, like his father had. He did not collapse the drywall with our bodies. But I saw him weep in the yard.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“By some gift of grace or desperation, I found my way to church basements full of people who knew that darkness and had groped their way out. They had words for my unutterables and I listened to them. I surrendered to these people, to the truth that this world—in all its pain and light—would not disappear if I hid from it.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

“A space that filled with the shocking light of how much I could hurt the person I least wanted to. It was the first love that made sense of the word tender, which refers not only to a gentle feeling, but to the ache and vulnerability of loving someone. Which is not the same thing as protecting them.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

“I have always been afraid to have children. I didn't want to give them the parts of me--the hurtling hunger, the shame--but now I know there is no avoiding it. The best I can do is teach them not to fear the dark.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“I'm not brave, I tell her. Just curious.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs