Whip Smart Quotes

“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, 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, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“That is the gift of taking the long road: you know you're not missing anything.”
― Melissa Febos, 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, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“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, 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, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“Real trauma is like a giant hunk of scar tissue that the rest of your life accommodates, grows around. 251”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“The stories I told about the dungeon were carefully slanted. People loved them; they were funny. The reasons why I wanted someone to tell me to stop I kept hidden, and so no one did. In my telling, the job became alternately gross, hilarious, tedious, sexy, glamorous and shocking. It depended if I was trying to befriend or seduce you. I had become an expert at discerning immediately what a person’s response would be and how to play it up or down. No one heard about the real disgust, pleasure, or sexuality my job involved. I wouldn’t have known how to describe those aspects if I wanted to.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“I would be in a social situation, a party, dinner, or just hanging out with friends, and suddenly all of the embedded social dynamics would be exposed to me, like a sheet stripped off of a stained mattress. All of the unspoken desires, motives, resentments, and insecurities of everyone in the room would be revealed, on their faces, in their movements and words, emanating from them like body heat. I would tell myself that I was just paranoid, but I wasn’t; I knew that what I was seeing was real and was always there, and it filled me with terrible sorrow. Everyone was so afraid, so needy.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“I loved college. I had always loved school. Not only because I was good at it and because I wanted to be good, but also because nothing compared to the explosion that happened in my mind when I understood the concepts of physics or unlocked the meaning of a poem. I craved the pop and spark of ideas, of new pathways searing through my consciousness. The excitement I felt in classes and in writing felt pure. There had been moments as a teenager, reading alone, when the prismatic, interconnected meaning of things exploded into my consciousness and I would feel as though I had stumbled up to the lip of a canyon, paralyzed, but vibrating with inspiration. And in college, there were teachers who really knew things, who has learned out of love, and the experience of learning from them felt like a kind of love itself.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“I had never considered work something that shaped you; it was more like styrofoam packing peanuts: stuff that took up a lot of space but was necessary for a certain degree of comfort.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“Pain has few rivals in its ability to slow time. Fear, excitement, elation - these are kissing cousins, all with the sensorial power to render each second humming with every tick and gasp of our bodies, the whirr of insect wings and distant car engines. Sometimes, I could savor these moments, relish them as opportunities to walk straight into the fact of being alive.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“At a certain level of noise and crowd, New York’s mania can be a comfort, like bobbing on top of a salty wave, everyone shifting in tandem—tightly bound molecules pulled by some greater force, the jumbled twine of our wills somehow unifying into a single tide.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“My anxiety never felt directly related to the session; like the melancholy of my childhood, it would seep into everything.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“In a way, Dylan and I were perfect for each other but also doomed: in our silence we simultaneously protected and betrayed each other.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“Fifteen hundred dollars. For an hour’s work. It sounded amazing, when you didn’t know what the work meant, or when you pretended not to.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“Sometimes, back when I was a pot smoker, this awful thing would happen. I would be in a social situation, a party, dinner, or just hanging out with friends, and suddenly all of the embedded social dynamics would be exposed to me, like a sheet stripped off of a stained mattress. All the unspoken desires, motives, resentments, and insecurities of everyone in the room would be revealed, on their faces, in their movements and words, emanating from them like body heat. I would tell myself that I was just paranoid, but I wasn’t; I knew that what I was seeing was real and was always there, and it filled me with terrible sorrow. Everyone was so afraid, so needy.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“Even as a kid, I’d found power in the ability to claim a hidden world.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“It was childish grandiosity and my intelligence helped, but hunger is what made it so powerful.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“What are you doing?” I asked skeptically, but I could feel a kernel of hope in me, swelling with every word she spoke that didn’t tell me to leave. Standing before her bedroom window, Greta sank to her knees, pulled me down beside her, and in her husky voice she asked her God to help me. She prayed that my “god-shaped hole” be filled, and when she spoke that phrase, “god-shaped hole,” something cracked open in me and that hope spilled out, threading through my body like some happy poison.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“I felt a tiny crumpling in my chest. I hurried back to my seat. Autumn blew me a kiss, and I rolled my eyes.”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life

“What a mundane revelation, that there should be certain courtesies extended to your partner out of consideration or as a simple gesture of commitment. 271”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“To stay clean, I had to retrieve my conscience, to reconnect emotionally with my actions. 156”
― Melissa Febos, Whip Smart: A Memoir

“A speedball hits you like a huge, warm wave. The back of your neck throbs, your ears ring, and everything inside of you muffles while everything outside of you sharpens. The initial rush of it doesn't last long, a minute, maybe two. Then it's a downward slide into a normal high. Only the first one can be perfect. After that, you need more of everything. (128)”
― Melissa Febos, 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, Whip Smart: A Memoir