MM > MM's Quotes

“In the dresser there are two sets of rosary beads, a Brigid's cross, and an iron pendant on a chain. And then there is her, more worthy of worship, with a knee on either side of my hips”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“To be with her is a sin, to be without her is a tragedy.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“I would drape my own soul over her body to protect her from eyes like mine.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“She took her Eucharist before mine and I quietly apologised to Jesus for the downgrade from her tongue to mine.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“My heart lurches, as if it wants to leave my awful body and go make a home in her.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“Imagine a place where I could scream and not be heard, and fail and not be seen. A place where my insignificance would not hurt, because everybody would be insignificant.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“My own feelings are a hedge of briars that I can’t bring myself to touch. There are so many unhappy people, I just don’t want to find out that I am one of them. They walk among us, they touch you, and you become them. Introspection is like cyanide. Life is fine this way, ignorance is easy, I do what is easy. Doesn’t that make the most sense?”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“I'll marry you if you get past all the shame of being with me.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“I understood that there were limits to love, and I felt sure that one day people would run out of love for me.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“But I'm the inconvenient thing. I am my own biggest obstacle. I always have been.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“A bright smile comes to Martin, and I copy it. He nods. It means the world to him. It is nothing but a cheek ache to me.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“My mother had never known me either, though it wasn't because I hadn't given her a chance. I'd given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn't seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn't even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I thought about how I used to watch my mother sleep sometimes, how innocent she looked with her hands tucked under the pillow. In those moments, I saw her as a little girl, and I felt that nothing was her fault—just a chain of fears and feelings passed down from generation to generation. In those moments I thought, You can show her how to love you better by being loving to her. But it was easier to be loving when the person was asleep.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed: A Novel

“You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I could never tell if other people genuinely believed their own bullshit or not. I felt genuinely perplexed about it—especially at work lunches, but frequently in my nonlunch life too. At times like this, I longed to break the fourth wall, to whisper, Hey, just between us: Is this a performance or is it really what you believe?”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Expect nothing. The simplicity of that directive, its bare bones, self-contained power was intoxicating. Expect nothing. It was so clean, so potent.
It was a phrase you'd associate with a person who didn't need anything from anyone; a closed system. An automaton. I wanted to be that person. I wanted to be that automaton.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“What did it mean to love something so much and also be wrong about it? What did it mean to love a version of something that might not really exist—not as you saw it? Did this negate the love? Was the love still real?”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I thought about how I wanted to take a knife and cut myself out of me. I thought about how I'd been praying for a truck to just hit me. I thought about death and truth and how, in some languages, they were just one letter apart. I wanted to ask her if she knew that.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Stop fucking thinking for one second and try to have a good time, I said to myself.
Never in my life have I had a good time, I replied.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I'd thought about getting a rug, but I couldn't commit. I felt that committing to a rug would mean I existed on the planet more than I actually wanted to exist.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I didn't need to be or do anything more than simply exist for them to love me. It was as though they loved my naked soul, some inner essence, with an unconditional love.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Setting boundaries doesn't always feel good," said Dr. Mahjoub. "Just because it feels bad doesn't mean it's wrong.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I could never tell how other people saw me. Most of the time I felt like I was riding around in a car with a fogged windshield that made it difficult to decipher the perceptions of others. They were all just kind of pantomiming outside, grunting, while I ran the wipers over and over. No matter how fast I wiped, I couldn't clear the fog.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Is death the best we can aim for? I’m starting to think it might be.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“She was rejecting that world before it rejected her again. But that didn’t mean she didn’t secretly want to live there.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Oh fuck, I thought. I like this girl.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I’m sure god will forgive you. God loves M&M’s.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“This kind of love seemed strange to me. It was not out of love that I'd obeyed my mother, not really. It was out of fear, the way a person might placate a punishing God. Ultimately, I'd always been terrified that if I didn't please my mother, she would smite me.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I