We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust.
I want love to conquer all. But love can’t conquer anything. It can’t do anything on it’s own.It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.
Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying you’re friends is easy. Being friends is not.
It’s one thing to fall in love. It’s another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.
You know what’s a great metaphor for love? Sleeping beauty. Because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up.— Tiny Cooper
he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.
You don’t know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can’t know every me, and I can’t know every you.
Life goes on. Get over it. You’re still young. It’ll get better. Blah, Blah, Blah
I’m told there’s no going back. So I’m choosing forward.
Some days are like this. And the only way to get through them is to remember that they are only one day, and that every day ends.
We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.
Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you’re breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right.
rolf! what? are you really rolling on the floor laughing? well, please stay down there for a sec while I KICK YOUR ASS.
Because sometimes you just have to dance like a madman in the Self-Help section of your local bookstore.
I’ve always known I was gay, but it wasn’t confirmed until I was in kindergarten.It was my teacher who said so. It was right there on my kindergarten report card: PAUL IS DEFINITELY GAY AND HAS VERY GOOD SENSE OF SELF.
It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.
You know there’s no such thing as a complete lie. There’s always some truth in there.
It is much harder to lie to someone’s face.But.It is also much harder to tell the truth to someone’s face.
He was attractive. I knew that. And I knew that attractive people always got away with things.
…because if you can make yourself happy in the rain then you’re doing pretty alright in life.
It’s b******* to think of friendship and romance being different. They’re not. They’re just variations of the same love. Variatons of the same desire to be close.
My pride shut me up, my hurt shut me down, and together they ganged up on my hope and let her get away.
If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. You memories will be my most lasting impressions.
What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.
The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them.
We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.That’s all we ask of you. Make more than dust.
I can see that the sadness has returned. And it’s not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.
i want to say to her: i just want to be myself. and i want to be with someone who’s just himself. that’s all. i want to see through all the performance and all the pretending and get right to the truth.
flagrant, adj. I would be standing right there, and you would walk out of the bathroom without putting the cap back on the toothpaste.
Saving others is always more important than saving yourself. It has to be, or none of us would do any good.
Well, I agree that ‘trial and error’ is a pretty pessimistic name for it. And maybe that’s what it is most of the time. But I think the point is that it’s not just try-error. Most of the time, it’s try-error-try.
I don’t have the heart to tell him that’s the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.
The good old days needed a lot of improvement. People aren’t the only things that get better with age.
Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.
I find my greatest strength in wanting to be strong and my greatest bravery in deciding to be brave….If there’s no feeling of fear then there’s no need for courage.
I didn’t want to see her. I was desperate to see her. I wanted to hold it together. I wanted to melt down right at her feet and scream, Look what you’ve done to me.
There’s no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.
I can take everything on her face at face value, and that’s valuable in a friend.
Truces may stop the battles, but part of you will always feel like you’re at war.
We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don’t understand this at all. It’s like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired. In my experience, desire is desire, love is love.
My mother said I should have a ‘change of scenery.’ The word scenery made be think of a play. And as we were driving around, it made sense that way. Because no matter how much the scenery changed, we were still on the same stage.
I wish she could see how it hits him. The look on his face, his life caving in. Because then maybe she’d realize, if only for a split second, that even though the world doesn’t matter to her, she matters to the world.
Music is everywhere. It’s in the air between us, waiting to be sung.
Part of my music is being alone, having that time to shut down all other noises to hear the tune underneath.
When the heart stops, you die. Love is everywhere that life is, and if there is no love for life, you die. Giving up on love is the same thing as giving up on life itself.
She had been lost on her own and I had been lost on my own, so it was natural that once we found each other we wanted to keep being unlost with each other. But that, at heart, had made us exist.
But none of that really mattered. I had found my tribe. It felt like a family reunion for the family I’d never really known, a homecoming at the place where I was always meant to be but hadn’t known how to find.
In this space, in this moment, we are who we want to be. I am lucky, because for me that doesn’t take much courage. But for others, it takes a world of bravery to make it to the clearing.
Courage. I need courage. Because this is surely the stupidest idea in the history of guys liking girls.
What’s the point of something virtual if it doesn’t end up being real?
Hell, yes,” Dev says, sitting up now. “Don’t get me wrong – we’re totally going to make the beast with two backs tonight. But if we do it right, it’s going to feel like holding hands.
If you’re not able to laugh inside a sex shop,then you probably shouldn’t be there.I mean, they don’t call it fooling around for nothing.
Breath and heat and contact and shirts off and skin on skin and smiles and murmurs and the enormity revealing itself in the tiniest of gestures, the most delicate sensations.
Singing in the rain. I’m singing in the rain. And it’s such a fucking glorious feeling.
and when hecatches meoff guardand says’i love you’i catch himoff guardand say ‘i need your help.
it’s not his bodythat changesright away.it’s somethinginside. he sayshe wants tobe a littleweaker. i don’tunderstand.i say ‘thinner?’and he says’no, i wantto be strongerin a differentway.’ notbecause of me,but for me.
It’s hard to think of such things when you are busy dreaming or loving or screwing. The context falls away.
Some people are given relatively fair lives. But others-they carry the burden of the unfairness of the world.
When you need to hold onto something, you should. Whatever gets you through, take it.
The past and future are what’s complicated. It’s the present that’s simple.
You can’t know what it is like for us now–you will always be one step behind.Be thankful for that.You can’t know what it was like for us then–you will always be one step ahead.Be thankful for that, too.
The sound of the words as they’re said is always different from the sound they make when they’re heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside
The sound of words as they’re said is always different from the sound they make when they’re heard, because the speakers hears some of the sound from the inside.
I want to say more, but don’t know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable night-time conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there’s no light in the room.
I want to say more, but don’t know what the words are supposed to be. I feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable night time conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there’s no room in the air.
There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There’s a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.
When you live as I do, you cannot indulge in jealousy. If you do, it will rip you apart.
Life goes on is a redundancy. Life is defined by its going on.
Now she’s lit by the warm orange spreading from the horizon as not-quite-day, becomes not-quite-night
It was a mistake,” you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.
If I’m not telling you something, it’s for a reason. Just because you trust me, it doesn’t mean I have to automatically trust you. Trust doesn’t work like that.
He counts as an ex because he made me feel dumped even without making me feel loved first.
If I lose it now, I will lose you, too. I know that. I hate it.
the sadness will ebbthe trouble is the time it might take
I wanted love to conquer all. But love can’t conquer anything.
But none of that really mattered. I had found my tribe. It felt like a family reunion for the family I’d never really known, a homecoming at the place where I was always meant to be nut hadn’t known how to find.
There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with.
What’s the point of all this magic, if no one really knows how to use it? But I guess the same could be said about life. Which is another form of magic, only less showy.
It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.
Maybe this is what alone really is — finding out how tiny your world is, and not knowing how to get anywhere else.
It is a sound like loneliness—enough to let you know you’re there, but not enough to fill you with life.
I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much.
I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.
After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are. There is no way to know why.
Tony knows the names of trees and birds. As we walk around, he points them out to me. I try to record them in my mind, but the information never holds. What matters to me is the emotional meaning of the objects.
My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I’m perpetually surprised, but there’s nothing wrong with me that I can fix.
I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.
It was so much easier when I didn’t want anything. Not getting what you want can make you cruel.
In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love for a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard, when it’s so obvious.
No. I don’t. You don’t always have to be who they want you to be, you know.
I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t usually like people. So when I do, part of me is really amused and the other part refuses to believe it’s happening.
We are young and the night is young. We are in the middle of somewhere and we are feeling everything.
Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He’s not even worth a lie.
As soon as Neil is out of the shower, he texts Peter. You up? he asks.And the reply comes instantly:For anything.
I wake up feverish, sore, uncomfortable.Is it sickness or is it heartbreak?I can’t tell.The thermometer says I’m normal, but I’m clearly not.
What are your interests?””Your son in my room,” I said.”Excuse me?””The sun and the moon,” I said. “Astronomy.
Maybe fate’s arithmetic is so diffuse that it’s not arithmetic at all.
The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies – all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect
One last song. One last turn. One last street. no matter how hard you try to keep hold of a day, it’s going to leave you
She is no longer a person in his life; instead, she is a person that other people will remind him of.
It is always the ones who believe that are hurt the worst when things go wrong.
No more looking at a wall and pretending it’s a mirror. No more shelving fiction in the non-fiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it.
Falling in love with someone doesn’t mean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel.
Feelings don’t follow rules. Guilt does. Fear does. But attraction? No way.
People say that time slips through our fingers like sand. What they don’t acknowledge is that some of the sand sticks to the skin. These are the memories that will remain, memories of the time when there was still time left.
He was beautiful in the way that a breeze is beautiful—the kind of beauty you feel gratitude for.
I want you to be honest with me. Even if it hurts. Although I would prefer for it not to hurt. – A
It had never occurred to me that a person could know all the right things to say and deploy them to get what she wanted, without having to mean any of it.
To love–to fall–is not a question. To touch–to kiss–to speak–those are questions. There is nothing worse than a ruined friendship. There is nothing better than a companion. Somewhere in between lies risk. Somewhere in between, lies.
you’d think that silence would be peaceful. but really, it’s painful.
The question is there in each silence. The question is there in the space between you. But you cannot bring it aloud.
What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread
O Lord, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of doubt, at least let mewear a Walkman…
Dreaming and loving and screwing. None of these are identities. Maybe when other people look at us, but not to ourselves. We are so much more complicated than that.
placid, adj.Sometimes I love it when we just lie on our backs, gaze off, stay still.
There was a time before youbut I can’t remember it nowa time before your beauty and Iwere formally introducedI’m sure I lived without youbut I don’t remember howcan’t imagine living withoutthese feelings you’ve produced
It’s one thing to fall in love. It’s another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.
I say good-bye to hope, but I also say goodbye to hope’s disappointment.
There’s no way to know if we would have lasted. There’s no way to be sure, and plenty of reasons to doubt it. I just wish I’d had the chance. That is one of the things I miss the most— the chance to make it work.
You can’t wander around and think the wandering will call them back.
I’ve always wanted the happy ending, but now I’ll just settle for the ending.
Now I just want it to end. I’ve always wanted the happy ending, but now I’ll just settle for the ending.
That’s what it felt like—that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me.
My eyes are open and I’m not seeing a thing because I am so lost inside.
That’s what it felt like – that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me.
(Kindness) is much more a sign of character than mere niceness. Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”-David Levithan (Every Day)
It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.
The past and the future are complicated. It’s the present that’s simple.
happy to see me and unhappy to see me at the same time
We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.
If we actually thought about every decision we made, we’d be paralyzed … You have to decide which decisions you’re actually going to make, and then you have to let the rest of them go.
There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.
So what’s your story?” Ryan asks.Avery looks up at him, hand still in the water. “My story?”“Yeah. Everybody has at least one.
It’s Miranda who speaks up. “You’re gay,” she says, with complete seriousness. “And I love you.
They wouldn’t beat him up. They wouldn’t break his ribs. He knew that. But they had other ways of breaking him – with silence, with disappointment, with disapproval.
The past and future are what’s complicated. It’s the present that’s simple.
Your Temporary Santa, “He says presents aren’t important, but I think they are- not because of how much they cost, but for the opportunity they provide to say ‘I understand you.
We stay this way until twilight colours the window and the hour calls me home
Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other.
The kiss I like the most is one of the slow ones. It’s as much breath as touch, as much no as yes. You lean in from the side, and I have to turn a little to make it happen.
This is the power of a kiss: It does not have the power to kill you. But it has the power to bring you to life.
elliptical, adj.The kiss I like the most is one of the slow ones. It’s as much breath as touch, as much no as yes. You lean in from the side, and I have to turn a little to make it happen.
They should be going to sleep, but good company is the enemy of sleep.
Enlightenment is scary. Sometimes things look better in the dark.
I know I should just leave. Just go. Because there’s a point where a mistake turns into a big mistake, and I should probably come to my senses before I get there.
You can find sorrow in the arithmetic, and you can find a bittersweet hope.
Really, weren’t these facts just placeholders until the long view could really assert itself?
i am like a dead begoniahanging upside down because like a dead begonia I don’t give a fuck
In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender.I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard, when it’s so obvious.
With all due respect, if you’re forty-three, then I’m a fetus.
It’s been said of me that I know how to love well, if any person alive can possess such knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us.It is all such a blessing—in the beginning, and the end, and the during.
The body is the easiest thing to adjust to… It’s the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.
Jest when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die.
Just when we stopped wanting to kill ourselves, we started to die.
I once told him that the best way to break up a fight is to step between the two people and start singing ancient folk songs. But I’d never heard of anyone actually doing such a thing.
yearning n. and adj.At te core of this desire is the belief that everything can be perfect.
I just mean that if we go through this thing and it changes us so much, you have to hope that it changes us for the better, right? If goodness can’t come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.
My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.
I don’t like to do what people expect. Why should I live up to their expectations instead of my own?
Be careful what you’re doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head.
Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care about us. Time doesn’t care about us. That’s why we have to care about each other.
The devil doesn’t make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.
tiny: did someone die?me: yeah, i did.he smiles again at that.tiny: well, then… welcome to the afterlife.
When you dance, you measure distance as if it’s a solid thing; you make precise judgments every time two bodies exist in relation to each other. So I knew right away the definition of the space between us.
I had yet to learn that when it came to gender, I was both and neither.
Pink is female – but why? Are girls any more pink than boys? Are boys any more blue than girls? It’s something that has been sold to us, mostly so other things can be sold to us.
Even though you’re not my type, gender wise, you’re certainly my type, person-wise.
I think they would like the songs betterif I left out the names, or changedthe pronouns.
People like to say being gay isn’t like skin color, isn’t anything physical. They tell us we always have the option of hiding.But if that’s true, why do they always find us?
Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were.
The pink-haired boy is scared, so incredibly scared – only the thing you’ve most wished for can scare you in that way.
this blue shirt i have is practically the same color as my jeans, and looking all-blue is something only cookie monster can pull off.
I am proud that I defy your categories. I am proud that I don’t fit easily into any box. I am proud of all the things I am and all the things i can be. Question yourself every time you think you only see one thing in me.
It was the most amazing feeling in the world. to know that something right happened, and to know that it had happened not through luck or command but simply because it was right.
It felt good to be surrounded by books, by all this solid knowledge, by these objects that could be ripped page by page but couldn’t be torn if the pages all held together.
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular – but one must take it because it is right.
The more kindness and justice are challenged, the more we must embrace them. Only when you are challenged – and only when you challenge yourself – do you discover what truly matters.
Long live protest songs, in whatever form they take.
It’s a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn’t really care what you have to say.
Self-preservation isn’t worth it if you can’t live with the self you’re preserving.
To feel such a longing for his own life, even as he’s living it—he wonders what that means.
LYNDA (TO TINY):Look forward to the momentwhen it falls apart.Look forward to themomentwhen you mustrearrange yourheart.It might feel like theend of the world-but it’s the beginning of yourart.
Whatever you had — I don’t know what it was, and that’s fine. But it must not be easy for you. You miss him, and that’s okay. But you have to figure that if it’s too much hard to hang on, then maybe you should let go.
you live each day one at a timeyou live every day all at onceyou live with the possibility of good-byeyou move on.
My life changes all the time, but books don’t change. My reading of them changes– I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you’ve been before, and it welcomes you back.
I hate that would. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get to be called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: ‘Do you think she’s straight?’ ‘Oh no. She’s scenic.
I had never really thought of marriages as things that involved liking. I had just assumed this man-woman arrangement was yet another adult quirk, like flossing.
I can tell from the glint in her eyes that she’s at least an acquaintance of Dorothy.
As we become the distant past, you become a future few of us would have imagined.
The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.
A Cue from NatureRun outside during a thunderstormThat downpour, that conquered hesitation, that exhilarationThat’s what unlonely is like
I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else.
All the quips in the world couldn’t prevent Oscar Wilde from becoming a lovesick fool.
I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I’m seeing we don’t live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It’s an infinite playlist.
I say good-bye to hope, but I also say good-bye to hope’s disappointment.
I have never wanted a lover. In order to have a lover, I must go back to the root of the word. For I have never wanted a lover, but I have always wanted to love, and to be loved.
But I don’t know when that day will arrive, and it would be too easy to forget to marvel at the beauty in this moment. In every moment.
When I turned to look at you, I was afraid to move again—the moment was just too beautiful to be lost.
Invoking the moral high ground somehow makes you lose it. Using a secret as a weapon makes you almost as bad as the transgressor.
It might feel like the end of the world–but it’s the beginning of your art.
I try to convince myself that it’s the alcohol talking. But alcohol can’t talk. It just sits there. It can’t even get itself out of the bottle.
It is a horrible wonderful thing to be in love with you. To get to hear you sing for hour after hour but never be the subject of the song. To listen and listen and listen.
She is the weakness you think of as strength while I am the strength you have no idea is there.
Let’s always love each other, and never be in love with each other.
The world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong.
Betrayal. Lust. Secrecy. Devotion. I think we do these things to feel more alive. When the truth is that alive is alive — you can feel it in anything, if you give it a chance.
If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the painful process of finding it.
I couldn’t fight the tide, so Idecided to float along.