The Dry Season Quotes

“The nature of such grief, and all grief, is that it speaks in superlatives: you will always feel this way, you will never feel that way again. The ringing credibility of that voice passes, too, if one only waits long enough without relapse.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“The stories I chose to escape into became portals that delivered me into their world, but they also delivered the world into me.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“I remembered going to our public library after school one day when I was fourteen and reading Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina straight through. To read a whole book in a single sitting, something I did a lot as a young person, is like being dipped in someone else's consciousness. I looked up at the end to find that night had fallen without my noticing; I had been too enraptured by the story of Bone, the young narrator. The library's overhead lighting tinted everything the yellow of chicken broth. As I stared at the silhouettes of trees outside the library window, I burst into tears, grief flooding through me.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“The fear I felt for Nora was a fear that belonged to me. My own fear of going back. Of the stranger I had become during those years. As I wove through clusters of tourists and stopped at a curb to wait for a red stoplight, that fear felt fresh, cool as the wind that chilled my face. But it wasn't fresh. It had been stored in my body, waiting for me to let it out, to let it go. I didn't need to fear the Maelstrom anymore. I was never going back.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“We usually know the truth about ourselves, whether or not we are able to face it. It would be easier if the truth surfaced on its own, but mostly it doesn't. Self-mythologies are self-perpetuating. The truth must be sought.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“That morning, I did not return. It was the first time that my anger outweighed the thing I called love.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Soon after that, I began making lists in my diaries. Beside tallies of books I'd read and words whose definitions I looked up, there were names. People I wanted to seduce. Not always for sex, because what I want from them was ultimately more subtle than that: to secure their focus, to make them like me. To cast a bit of glamour, a spell of protection. When I caught the flapping sail of their attention, I felt a swell of safety and power. For a moment, I soared. I wanted redemption, too, probably. That liquid pleasure without the risk. For that, I needed to be the one at the helm.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“In my quietest moments, on the drive home from work, my body humming as I belted out a song about love, and just before I fell asleep or after I woke, I was merely an animal with a past. I sensed how much I didn't know yet. I understood that an animal could be very hungry and not know for what, only in what direction it lay.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“After I left the Maelstrom, I craved it, too. I had reached my end and still I longed for my former lover just as I had once longed for heroin, with a desire that blotted out the certainty of what would follow, how temporary the relief. For those two years she had been my pharmakon, the Greek term for a substance that could either be poison or cure. She had been both, and, like with all substances I had ever relied upon, I sweated her out. After four days -- the exact same number of days it had taken me to pass through the most acute stage of heroin withdrawal -- my sweat dried and my vision cleared.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Then, I thought, Oh. What a savvy trick, to convince women that we should not want all of this. As Gloria Steinem pointed out: "Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke." Humiliation is painful and distracting, even from the fact that one is otherwise happy.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world, suddenly. I could live alone and by my own instincts and preferences, or I could find someone with compatible habits. How had I never imagined the option of sharing the practices that I craved and on which my peace depended? Sharing a life always sounded horrible to me. I didn't want to share. I wanted a whole life for myself. But what if I could live alongside someone else and not have to haggle over time and energy, sacrificing independence and fulfillment for connection?”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Conversely, I noticed how much people talked about sex and romance, not only on television, but in life. It was all some people talked about. It was all that some of my friends talked about. I became increasingly bored with these conversations. "But what about you?" I wanted to say. I was wary of acting as an evangelist for celibacy, though in truth I would have liked to prescribe it to many. My life was empty of lovers and more full than it had ever been.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“So many people fantasized about romantic love that would sweep them away, obliterate their agency and release them from accountability, a "tormenting, self-heightening pleasure, like a hail of hot stones," as I had. But no other human could exert that kind of power in love. It was a storm that rose from within, and which we projected onto a lover.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Nora was also an animal with a past, one distinct form mine. She had chosen her path and would follow it to her own conclusion. I could not truly interfere. The only thing to do was love her, so I told her I did as we hung up the phone. In the silence that followed, I remembered that urge to shake my past self, to command her. I would never have responded to Nora that way, nor anyone else I loved. I understood that fury and panic had no power to dissuade a person in thrall to such an experience. I wondered if I could muster the same tenderness for my past self that I felt for my friend.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“I understood that exile was a common sentence for those who served as mirrors before a person was ready to see themselves reflected. I had become estranged from almost everyone who loved me when I was an active addict, and again in the Maelstrom. My lover could not tolerate the presence of anyone willing to name the poison we combined into, and I could not tolerate choosing anything that caused conflict with her. Walter had been exiled for similar reasons. I knew I could be, too.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Sarton lived what I imagined as one possibility: being an older middle-aged woman and then an old woman, living in solitude, being in nature, writing, maintaining true relationships, having a sense of the sacred. She was not celibate, though, and her anguish was mostly linked to love.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“I wanted to call someone else who had loved him like I had loved him, but they were all gone, too. I knew that Carlo's beauty had not protected him. He had been loved, but not by all whose hands had reached for him. That desire had been no kind of protection, only a slow looting.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“I had described to her my quiet mornings, the inventory I was writing, and how I had begun to notice so many people drunk driving through their lives, getting high off of other humans.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“A friend who has seen you in the throes of a maelstrom is similar to those who saw you at your addicted bottom. They have witnessed your worst, your most powerless. They have seen you in ways that you could not see yourself. This dynamic is the foundation of so much humiliation and intimacy. The same principle of vulnerability renders the back of the neck and knee erotic.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“The people I gravitated to, or would have were I not celibate, did not see me. They saw only a source of what promised to sate their hunger but never would. They were outside of themselves, outside of the place where true empathy resides.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“When I stripped away the great swells of feeling that obscured it, I could see how those habitually compelled by this ecstasy were almost robotic in their pursuit, like sex Roombas. Over the past three months I had observed this dynamic more often than I had participated in it, and I had come to understand that it was not a compliment to be pursued by a sex Roomba. The starkness of this fact disturbed me, as if I had suddenly recognized the smell of ammonia instead of heedlessly following it. As if I had just realized that money was nothing but paper.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Despite my inclination to please, when lovers asked me to touch myself so they could watch, I always refused. I was shy, but that wasn't it. The prospect repelled me the way that client with the vibrator had. There was no performance to my self-pleasure and there was so much performance with lovers. Self-pleasure was the sole realm of true pleasure, unmediated or degraded by performance. To allow the gaze of a spectator to intrude upon that realm would have polluted it. It would have activated my internal spectator. Masturbating for a lover had more in common with sex work than with my private pleasure.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“One of the things that I remembered about sleeping with men was that it was hard to stop even if you didn't like it. It felt easier to just keep fucking them, because then you wouldn't have to emotionally clean up afterward. It was easier to keep fucking them than to find out how awful they might be when sexually thwarted-- a potential I knew was hard to overestimate. Masculinity was a glass vase perpetually at the edge of the table.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Confirming the impossibility of his enjoying it in a sexual way gave me full permission to luxuriate in the element of his touch that was not sexual but did include an element of the erotic. I was curious about this new pleasure that could not ever result in sex. The eros that did not erode, but nourished with its longing.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

“Part of making the students love a text was circumnavigating their first reactions to it. Even if they loved it, or thought they did, it was often a false love, driven less by comprehension and appreciation of the work itself than whatever they projected onto it.”
― Melissa Febos, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex