“Back and forth from Brooklyn to Manhattan. 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. Then it did the same with my history. As a dark speck of energy hurtling over the water toward that galaxy, I felt myself disappear. Relative to the image of infinity I was nothing, a clump of quantum matter skidding through the ether. It was as good as any drug.”
― Melissa Febos, quote from Whip Smart: A Memoir
“That is the gift of taking the long road: you know you're not missing anything.”
― Melissa Febos, quote from Whip Smart: A Memoir
“We kissed for two hours. Eventually, I led him into my bedroom and pulled off both of our shirts. He stopped me.
"This might sound weird; it's not typical guy response." I froze, suddenly awkward. "I mean, if I didn't feel the way I do with you I would be all for it, but I kind of think maybe it would be good to wait. I've rushed into sex, and had it be a mistake." He shrugged apologetically. "I mean, if it's safe to assume you are experiencing the same date that I am, then I think we will have time."
I was a little flabbergasted and more than a little embarrassed. How could I explain that the idea sounded like a huge relief to me, that I didn't quite understand where the impulse to start taking my clothes off came from? I had had the same experience. I rarely enjoyed first-time sex with partners, largely because I usually did it before I really knew or trusted them. Here was where the difference between what I knew and did remained wide. The shame I felt wash over me was tinged with that hatred of my own innocence. Was I still so green? So unconfident? Had I gone straight out of the extremity of sex work to the innocence of my adolescence? Where was my self-knowledge? Still, I was relieved.
"Of course. I agree totally." I clutched my T-shirt to my chest and smiled at him. "And yes, I am on the same date you are on."
"I thought so," he said. "I mean, I don't think you can feel like this when it's not reciprocal."
He left at 2:00 A.M. and called me at 11:00 the next morning to schedule our second date.”
― Melissa Febos, quote from Whip Smart: A Memoir
“I used to think that happiness, like God, was an idea weaker people were sold on, to manage the grief of a world with so much suffering. It is just easier, I thought, to decide that you are doing something wrong and you just need to buy the right thing, read the right book, find the right guru, or pray more to be happy than to accept that life is a great long heartbreak. Happiness is not what I imagined that mirage to be: an unending ecstasy or state of perpetual excitement. Not a high or a mirage, it is just being okay. My happiness is the absence of fear that there won't be enough -- enough money, enough power, enough security, enough of a cushion of these things to protect me from the everyday heartbreaks of being human. Heartbreak doesn't kill you. It changes you.”
― Melissa Febos, quote from Whip Smart: A Memoir
“I have always enjoyed watching women dress. The appeal isn't sexual. Most girls' first glimpse of private female life is watching their mothers dress and put makeup on. It makes sense that we'd find it comforting. Childhood fascinations often crystallize this way. Isn't beauty forever defined, in a sense, by the first things we found beautiful? Surely part of my pleasure results from the inundation of images that we all experience. But I also love ritual, and it is a mesmerizing one. I enjoy the ritual of dressing myself, too. It is a form of basking in a kind of femininity that I am opposed to as an ideal, but for better or worse, I think we all fetishize the female body, and intellectualization doesn't spare anyone the obsession.”
― Melissa Febos, quote from Whip Smart: A Memoir
“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, quote from Whip Smart: A Memoir
“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, quote from Whip Smart: A Memoir
Melissa Febos
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“I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer,”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Other Wind
“Hay naturalezas puramente contemplativas, impropias totalmente para la acción, que, sin embargo, merced a un impulso misterioso y desconocido, actúan en ocasiones con rapidez de que se hubieran creído incapaces.
El que, temeroso de que el portero le dé una noticia triste, se pasa una hora rondando su puerta sin atreverse a volver a casa; el que conserva quince días una carta sin abrirla o no se resigna hasta pasados seis meses a dar un paso necesario desde un año antes, llegan a sentirse alguna vez precipitados bruscamente a la acción por una fuerza irresistible, como la flecha de un arco. El moralista y el médico, que pretenden saberlo todo, no pueden explicarse de dónde les viene a las almas perezosas y voluptuosas tan súbita y loca energía, y cómo, incapaces de llevar a término lo más sencillo y necesario, hallan en determinado momento un valor de lujo para ejecutar los actos más absurdos y aun los más peligrosos.
Un amigo mío, el más inofensivo soñador que haya existido jamás, prendió una vez fuego a un bosque, para ver, según decía, si el fuego se propagaba con tanta facilidad como suele afirmarse. Diez veces seguidas fracasó el experimento; pero a la undécima hubo de salir demasiado bien.
Otro encenderá un cigarro junto a un barril de pólvora, para ver, para saber, para tentar al destino, para forzarse a una prueba de energía, para dárselas de jugador, para conocer los placeres de la ansiedad, por nada, por capricho, por falta de quehacer.
Es una especie de energía que mana del aburrimiento y de la divagación; y aquéllos en quien tan francamente se manifiesta suelen ser, como dije, las criaturas más indolentes, las más soñadoras.”
― Charles Baudelaire, quote from Paris Spleen
“The American people will regret the day I was crucified by politics and bureaucracy."
Billy Mitchell”
― James D. Bradley, quote from Flyboys: A True Story of Courage
“In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.”
― Orhan Pamuk, quote from The Museum of Innocence
“As I do not seem able much to heal, then maybe I can simply be a responsible witness to the miracle of the ordinary soul.”
― Sebastian Barry, quote from The Secret Scripture
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