He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

She knew through what fires the soul must crawl, and with what weeping one passed over. Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell. Once there, there was no turning back; once there, the soul remembered, though the heart sometimes forgot.

People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

The faggots act out their fantasies without beieving them to be real. The men act out their fantasies always proclaiming that they are real. . . . The men's fantasies are about control and domination and winning. The faggots move towards the limits of living in the body for they have known body ecstasy and want to live there with everyone always.

“What does a woman see in a woman that she can‘t see in a man?”
Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, “Tenderness.”
That shut me up.

I had to recreate myself and then become her again, and she would create a self and become herself again.

In New Orleans the wilderness is sensed as very near, not the redemptive wilderness of the western imagination but something rank and old and malevolent, the idea of wilderness not as an escape from civilization and its discontents but as a mortal threat to a community precarious and colonial in its deepest aspect.

There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.

Feminism can be experienced as giving life, or as taking one‘s own life back, a life that you might have experienced as what you have given to others, or even what has been taken by other people‘s expectations.

The first responsibility of a ‘liberated‘ woman is to lead the fullest, freest, and most imaginative life she can. The second responsibility is her solidarity with other women . . . she has no right to represent her situation as simpler, or less suspect, or less full of compromises than it really is.

A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.

I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

We rest our foreheads against each other, like sand dunes dissolving into each other. My tears pool in your clavicle, your hands run affectionately through my hair…I am exhausted from trying to understand why our stomachs hurt around each other so often, how the closeness felt in one moment meta-morphs into strangeness.

Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it's true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and have never been depressed.

Boystown hadn't been that much of a hangout for me in Chicago. It was literally a boys town, clearly not where the lesbians were, a neighborhood full of moneyed clubs where, if you were not physically knocked down by a horde of shirtless, waxed Ken dolls, you needed to resign yourself to the fact that you had no chance of getting a drink, unless you got a gay man to get it for you.

“… they tell you whatever lie it is they're telling to Blacks and Puerto Ricans and women that day…After watching Daddy, I haven't got the heart to see it all over again." She stopped, took a breath and lowered her eyes to the linoleum floor, " … Maybe some of it is that I don't have real work of my own. I go around being beautiful and having fun, yeah, but I don't have anything for me, really mine, and you do, and it fucking kills me.”

They had gone together to the cliff's edge and looked down at the strand and the calm sea. Asking a direct question about plans would have broken the ease between them. He let the moment pass.

His mother had served everyone…When she went to sit down, with her own plate, his brother had reached out and quickly pulled the chair from under her - and she had fallen backward, onto the floor. She must have been near sixty years of age at that time…but his father had laughed - all three of them had laughed, heartily, and had kept on laughing while she picked the pancakes and the pieces of the broken plate up, off the floor.

When Finn and I are drinking in dark bars, we forget we are in public, it‘s as though we go underwater. When we finish kissing, she pulls away and looks around, saying, Woah, everything is still here. We spend the nights looking at each other and not much else.

I ask Finn if things are always this insane and dramatic between two women, and she says yes. She says it's either like this, or monotonous and boring. As if there is no in-between.

There, he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, berween the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind…he had seen everything to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.

I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all…After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear, or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.

While the wealthy English were happy to take on large tracts of Irish land, English tradesmen and workers were not interested in resettlement. Why go to an island famous for its murderous upheavals and banditry, especially with the more lucrative and appealing prospect of the New World only an ocean-crossing away?

CATHERINE: No, not your wife. An instrument that one breaks and throws on the scrap-heap when one has finished with it...To die is nothing, but you have erased me from the world... you have disposed of me as just one more stone; and you are no more than this blind force that is crushing me.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.

In its 1970 manifesto, "The Woman Identified Woman," the New York-based group Radicalesbians* made the point with a bang: "A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion."

*Thomas did a good job of critiquing the transmisogyny of this and other separatist groups without resorting to dunking

“Like all antics, the game flops because of its own unwieldiness, its own excess of desire, its own desire so big and raw and exposed that it can‘t be satiated, but instead must get performed.”

No one knows better than I do how far heaven is, but I also know all the shortcuts. The secret is to die, when you want to, and not when He proposes. Or else to force Him to take you before your time.

I amused myself with the thought that people often make a point of declaring their uselessness in order to be helpful. I can‘t do anything, but I‘m here for you.

loneliness and heartbreak are not the same. I have been heartbroken and preoccupied with any number of pleasing but ultimately foolish pursuits, just as I have been lonely with a heart at least mostly intact (though it can be said that my heart, and perhaps yours, hums at the frequency of a low and ever-present breaking).

But in 1957, feminism and lesbianism were not necessarily and not frequently understood as being at all connected. That Lorraine made them so was a sign of her holistic approach to exploring her place in the world, and the world itself.

Desegregation isn‘t about Black people giving up their institutions

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

If you cannot carry out a revolution and are not in a position to negotiate reforms, then perhaps it is acceptable to do nothing at all. Better yet, to organize, analyze, and strategize—to put yourself in the best position for the next opportunity. Sometimes the right action may be to wait. At least, recent history suggests you should not try to effect maximum disruption at any moment that this appears possible.

…the recognition by most of the faithful that they were in fact much holier than their preachers, that they had a clearer sense of right and wrong, a more honest and intimate sense of love and compassion and decency.

One of the foundational principles of lesbian feminism is that each person‘s desire is their own responsibility, if not something they can choose, at least something they can choose to examine and take ownership of. Two decades before the emergence of what we now call queer theory, lesbian feminists argued for a vision of sexuality as a site of choice and political resistance.

Martin Luther, who, as the Chronicler drily remarks, “had a somewhat inflexible character, which, everyone agreed, was not improving with the passing of time”.

👍🏻

So I set out to write this book to articulate how:
- the unexplored consequences of AIDS
- and the literal gentrification of cities
- created a diminished consciousness about how political and artistic changes get made

No one who likes Yeats is capable of human intimacy

It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marked as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing

You shouldn‘t tell people the truth because you want to hurt them. You should tell them because they want to know it.

For the vast majority of the people on this planet, the thing that‘s going to kill them is already on the inside

Becoming a writer was partly a matter of acquiring technique, but it was just as importantly a matter of the spirit and a habit of the mind. It was the willingness to sit in that chair for thousands of hours, receiving only occasional and minor recognition, enduring the grief of writing in the belief that somehow, despite my ignorance, something transformative was taking place.

“We have the strength and peace of mind of those who never compromise.” But the nature of a cease-fire and a peace process is precisely negotiation, soul searching, and compromise. Much blood has been spilled over a quarter of a century in the name of a stark and absolute ambition: Brits out. Yet that ambition has not been realized.

Nothing teaches you the true nature of your friendships like a sudden death, worse still, a death that‘s shrouded in shame.

As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

“I don‘t deserve joy!”
“No one does. It‘s a gift from God.”

“I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.”

I love the genre of narrative nonfiction but I feel like this writer didn‘t entirely succeed in her goals - in fact she seemed to consistently undermine them

“The rich are only defeated when they are running for their lives”