By Melissa Febos
This book may have saved the most recent version of me. At the start of every book I’m someone, and at the end I’m someone else.
This book took me four months to finish, and for the first time, “life” wasn’t the reason to stand in my way of finishing it in a timely manner. My body physically could not pick up this book, and mentally I couldn’t get the words into my head.
It feels strange for me to reread books, I have to somehow build up the courage to pick up a book for the second time. I knew once I finished this book it would be one less voice telling me how to go on in this complicated world.
- “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror / Just keep going. No feeling is final / Don’t let yourself lose me.” -Rainer Marie Rilke
- “And comfort eases, but it does not erase. Until then, we keep reading.”
- “I carried a story of my own into that room but her voice silenced everything in me.”
- “…we trusted those stories because we could not trust our own.”
- “It was the only comfort I knew well enough to offer.”
- “It’s hard to care rightly for someone you fear losing.”
- “I was both looking for and leaving myself.”
- “That is, love doesn’t give us a god, unless we are also willing to become one.”
- “We coo at pregnant bellies, sanctify that most blatant acknowledgment of sex, but shame this ephemeral evidence. A hickey is personal.”
- “My body has always given me away. Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
- “Praying to Jesus was not for anyone in our family. But I loved the word mercy. The idea of falling to one’s knees moved something in me that I tended like a secret.”
- “I said yes and no at all the wrong times.”
- “…the sweet terror of being recognized.”
- “I barricaded myself in books and secrets.”
- “I was afraid to touch him, my little brother, afraid of how badly he might need that.”
- “For thirty dollars I could go anywhere without fear.”
- “How could I have defined him by any word that did not include my love for him?”
- “I have always chosen my poisons. The things that will hurt and grow me the most.”
- “But the real power here is his, in knowing what he needed and in asking for my help.”
- “The best we can offer each other, and ourselves, is a few honest words.”
- “We all want this in love — for our lovers to spot the marks of our losses, the scars that note how we have been changed, how we became the person they love.”
- “I did not choose my female body. But I chose every image painted on it.”
- “I wish I could tell you what’s wrong with me, I whispered, tears dripping onto my knees. It was a lie and also true.”
- “The thing about pain is that it pins you to the moment, to your body.”
- “Believe in this until you can believe in me.”
- “I still wanted to be a princess, and not for the political power.”
- “Of course I wanted something to hold onto — I could not hold onto myself.”
- “It is not easy to be seen, no matter how we crave it.”
- “Wanting something does not mean it will suit us.”
- “She wanted love to heal the wounds of her past.”
- “But what does it mean to be taken care of? Material security. Adoration.”
- “If he loved us, if he really loves us, where was he?”
- “A hope that somewhere else might be the truer life or love you have hoped for.”
- “I understood early that love was a mission to heal one’s own heart.”
- “Every prayer is answered, I think, though not often in the ways we imagine.”
- “Our selves are sometimes the only things over which we wield power. And our means of expressing it are sometimes chosen for us.”
- “It was the kind of story that I’d loved as a girl, when everything seemed tragic and romantic, the kind of story that only ended in a wedding or a funeral.”
- “The urge to list is an urge to locate and to contain. A list is an attempt to organize the chaos both inside and outside of us into something manageable, finite.”
- “Love is not a feeling, a fever, or need; ‘Love is as love does.'” – M. Scott Peck
- The problem with being known is that your people know when you are gone.”
- “We are in constant collaboration with our contexts.”
- “And writing was the only way I could think clearly. The thoughts in my mind ran on a loop — they were worried, obsessed, and small. They went nowhere. By building a story, I could find a beginning, middle, and end.”
- “But feelings have terrible manners — they are like children, or drunks.”
- “Feelings are not facts, they used to say in my meetings, and it was true. But facts had never rescued me and feelings had done their work.”
- “You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you.”
- “Maybe that’s all bravery is: when your hunger is greater than your fear.”
- “You cannot erase yourself. You can only abandon it.”
- “Some burdens can only be measured by their relief.”
Anjolie's Sake 