One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.
What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half.
There is a beauty in the world, though it’s harsher than we expect it to be.
Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design.
I was not beautiful, but I believed I had the possibility of beauty in me.
He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who’s learned to love the sensation of being pierced.
Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.
This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.
A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.
She’d never been religious. She hadn’t allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.
She has failed. She wishes she didn’t mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.
The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.
One of the reasons ordinary people are incapable of magic is simple dearth of conviction.
Love is deep, a mystery – who wants to understand its every particular?
The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.
Isn’t the universe full of gaseous elements?”Andrew says, “Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.
I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having ‘no edge’ being simple and worse, harmless.
You know, if you’re hopeful, if you’re even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn’t affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart.
End of story. ‘Happily ever after’ fell on everyone like a guillotine’s blade.
It’s the solitude that slays you. Maybe because you’d expected ruin to arrive in a grander and more romantic form.
Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.
She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.
It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire.
Tyler. His handsome, lion-eyed ravagement. His capacity for devotion. Which is so sexy. Why do so many gay men lack that? Why are they so distracted, so in love with the idea of more and more and then more, again?
I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they’re so eager to get to the light on the other side.
This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.
He could see himself selling himself as a compelling mutation, a young god, proud to the point of sexy arrogance of his anatomical deviation: ninety percent thriving muscled man-flesh and ten percent glorious blindingly white angel
It’s the country that would have him, since he lacked the necessary papers for more promising places.