“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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“Alışkanlık getirir eski yerine hiçbir şey duymamış düşünmemiş anlamamış olmanın rahatlığını. (s. 165)”
― Nâzım Hikmet Ran, quote from Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse
“You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?"
It will not."
If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me."
I, also M. Ratchett."
What's wrong with my proposition?"
Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face, M. Ratchett," he said.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Mord im Orientexpress
“Maybe that’s why I write romance. I’m a dreamer at heart. If I can’t have it in real life, I’ll live it on paper instead.”
― Nicola Haken, quote from Broken
“Yes, I love your eyes—they are black and deep and almond-shaped but I see the kindness in those eyes I have never seen before,”
― Durjoy Datta, quote from Our Impossible Love
“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Uljas uusi maailma
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