The Pisces Quotes

“Maybe [the ocean and I] were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up--boats, people--but it didn't look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that. It made me wonder what was inside of me.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I, myself, had a very complicated relationship with emptiness, blankness, nothingness. Sometimes I wanted only to fill it, frightened that if I didn’t it would eat me alive or kill me. But sometimes I longed for total annihilation in it—a beautiful, silent erasure. A desire to be vanished.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I would say I'm less afraid of dying than I am of life.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it -- when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even just for a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high - no longer be a drug - and that was why you grew tired of them.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Was it ever real? The way we felt about another person? Or was it always a projection of something we needed or wanted regardless of them?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“How dare he not give a fuck? What a luxury, the luxury of a man. The luxury of someone who looked at the ravages of time and went, “Eh.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“In some ways, my moods did and did not exist. People said that you could will a mood into being or will it away. Just think positively. But I never felt that way. My moods were their own entities, even if no one could understand why they were there. That was what made me scared of feelings. I realized now what I had to do, in spite of what others said, was not try to change a mood but surrender to it. I had to surrender to whatever feelings arrived and in doing so I could maybe ride them, floating on the waves. I decided I was going to surrender.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I made myself wrong for needing someone, for revealing that need. I needed more than the universe could give me. Clearly my feelings were too big for the universe to hold, too disgusting. I would not put them out there like that again. I didn't even want to have to feel them myself.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Feelings were a luxory of the young, or someone much stronger than me - someone more at ease with being human”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“...No one knows what they are doing on earth or even off it. The gods didn't even know what the gods were doing, assuming there were even gods. Did the void know what it was doing? Did it know itself? Maybe the void didn't even know what to do with itself and didn't even like itself. Maybe the nothingness knew only to fill itself with people, and in that way was a creator of sorts. Maybe nothingness was a god, but not intentionally cruel-not confident in itself. Maybe it was not evil or saying ha-ha to me, just lonely, hating itself, waning something else to stick inside itself to relieve itself of itself. It seemed as though Theo didn't know what he was doing. I obviously didn't either. In that way maybe we were like gods.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I liked the Beats for a second when I was fourteen. By sixteen I realized they were mostly just good for picking out a douchebag. There was something about douche bros and the Beats. They just gravitated there.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“There I was, a woman on the rocks by the ocean, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for the return of her lover. Everything I knew about art would say that I was a painting. I was certainly a poem. Sappho was too - her life, perhaps, unknowable, but her feelings were mine. I was mythic.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“How have the dates been treating you?'
'Disgusting,' I said.
'Ah, too bad.'
'Each its own little death.'
'Funny,' he said. 'You're like a little death.'
'What?' I asked.
'You are. You're ... gloomy yet charming. I like it.'
'Well, no one has said that before.'
'You're gently death-ish. You know about death, you're aware of it, and most people aren't anymore. But you're not a killer. You're a soft darkness.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I had felt, for a long time, that if I started crying I would not stop—that if I finally ripped, there would be nothing to stop my guts from falling out. I was scared of what might come out of me: the things I would see, what others would see. I was scared the feelings would eat me. Feelings were a luxury of the young, or someone much stronger than me—someone more at ease with being human. It was too late for tears. I was to keep going, to move forward on the same track in spite of life’s unsatisfying lifeness. I was not to ask where I was going or if it was where I really wanted to go. I was not to ask if I was actually going anywhere at all. But now, somehow, I was sobbing.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I'd owned enough New Age tchotchkes in my lifetime to know that within a few days of purchase they just seemed like more crap. But as you were shopping, sifting through the stones and their meanings, there was hope that this was a turning point. It was the velocity of buying something that was the high, the potentiality of it. I could capitalist-believe in magic.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Did anyone ever say that life was to be enjoyed and not suffered? What if the suffering was the point? But I didn't want to suffer anymore. I couldn't take it. That was clear. So I was going to try to be happy, even if it brought me more suffering.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I wish we could live the rest of our lives on these rocks,' I said. 'Why isn't it possible to just live at the edge of both, the ocean and the land?'
Of course I knew why. The edge was an uncomfortable and dangerous place for both of us. The rocks were nowhere to live. I had wanted him to come to my world for that same reason.
'One day these rocks won't be here,' he said. 'The ocean will waste them away.'
'Then we could find new rocks,' I said.
'Eventually you have to choose,' he said. 'That's how the story has always been and that's the way it will be forever.'
'But why?' I asked.
'Well,' he said, thinking, 'I guess because the choice is always there.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Was this how it was with all men? Did they all exist in a totally different reality - one in which you couldn't ask certain questions or the spell would be broken?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I believe in love more than anything. But I think I am very bad at it.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I felt silly asking to enjoy my life. I wondered if this was more than any human being should ask. Did anyone ever say that life was to be enjoyed and not suffered?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“This was what I needed— multiple men at all times. Then I wouldn’t need any of them. Put me naked in a clamshell. Let them all fawn around me.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I'd been wrong about death ... There was no gentle escape. When I had taken those Ambien in Phoenix I thought there was a peaceful way to just kind of disappear. But death wasn't gentle. It was a robber. It stole you out of yourself, and you became a husk.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I loved him too. But at the same time, who knew what love was exactly? I still didn't have it figured out. I remembered what Dr. Jude had said. The question is not what is love, but is it really love I'm looking for?”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Suddenly I wanted to stay. For maybe the first time in my life, I didn't want to abandon an uncomfortable feeling. I wanted to give her motherly love in the way she had tried to give me motherly love. Hers had always been from a distance, but it was there. And I wanted to give her motherly love in the way that she couldn't give me motherly love: by staying, even when it was uncomfortable. Wasn't it time that I showed up for her?
I also wanted to give her love in the sisterly way I had given Claire and Diana love. The group had taught me how to do that, imperfectly, but I knew what it was now. You just sat there with someone and listened. That was all you had to do.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“On the Ace roof there was flamenco music playing, or bossa nova or something. It all seemed so contemporary and pleasant. The sun was setting and I ordered a white wine. Was this how everything was now? Just nice? I wondered if other people felt comfortable within niceness, or whether they didn't even notice that things were nice. Maybe they expected everything to be nice. Maybe nice was like air to them.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“Mythical creatures were born and died all the time. They were born when we needed them and they died when we no longer saw them through the same eyes.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces

“I never asked to be born on the planet. I never asked to exist. But I am here now so could you maybe at least try and help me enjoy my life?'

I felt silly asking to enjoy my life.”
― Melissa Broder, The Pisces