[quotes] Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz 2012

 

"I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand."

"The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain."

"Dante who loved kissing dogs, who loved kissing his parents, who loved kissing boys, who even loved kissing girls. Maybe kissing was part of the human condition. Maybe I wasn't human."

"I tried to bring my thoughts back to the kitchen. Where I was. Where I lived. I hated the thing of living in my head."

"To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing."

"High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you - but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing."

"'Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you. Because I love you, Ari."

[quotes] Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett 1954

 

"We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"

[quotes] Notes of a Crocodile - Qiu Miaojim 1994

 

"Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility - from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterwards."

"Ever since I started to wise up, my family's been perpetually disappointed in me. Though it hurt them, I shattered their image of me little by little. If I didn't, I'd have to sacrifice myself in order to maintain a false ideal. I've been trying really hard to get over my resentment. It's cause them no small amount of pain."

"I'll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don't, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence."

"'It was one night about two or three years ago when my world started to change. I wasn't really sure what exactly was changing, but suddenly, there I was, in an unfamiliar place."

"As dolphins hear the call of their shared language and must turn back toward their origins, the three of us found ourselves attuned to a common frequency. It was an experience too profound for words."

"Though I don't understand how that's considered love on your part, I'm not negating it either. I guess everyone has a different way of expressing their love. No matter how it comes out, it always finds its way to the person it was meant for. I just didn't know - or care - if it would last."

"As I stood on the edge, you took hold of my heart, and suddenly I realized that somewhere in this great big world, there really was a you that loved me."

"Ever since I was little and started to learn what it meant to love, I never understood that I had to love me too - otherwise, what was the point? If I wanted to join the rest of humanity, the only solution was gradually to reveal my secret."

"'Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness even worse.'"

"Man's greatest sorrow is the loss of what was once his greatest desire."

"At Tun Tun's encouragement, I made a big decision: I wasn't going to fall in love with another woman. This time, I was going to make a clean break with the past and pursue a normal happiness."

"The best way for any relationship to end is with the sentiment I wish the best for you, and I am grateful for what we once had together."

"A certain part of me has died as I've learned to leave behind the qualities of my youth - the overanxiousness, oversensitivity, and self-consciousness, not to mention arrogance and idealism, that diminish with life experience. I was a late bloomer, but at long last, I lost my expectations but lacked the self-knowledge to comprehend my own passions and vices."

[quotes] Exile and Pride - Eli Clare 1999

 

"... to divide ourselves for the sake of other people's ease. It grew from standing in doorways we couldn't enter with our whole selves, where our multiple loyalties were attacked as treason instead of being recognized as the richly generative forces they are."

"Instead it keeps issuing this challenging invitation: to bring our whole broken selves to these problems within which we struggle and engage them with all of our beings. Search your pockets. Start jotting down, your own map of contradictions."

"The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us. They rise up around me - bodies stolen by hunger, war, breast cancer, AIDS, rape; the daily grind of factory, sweatshop, cannery, sawmill; the lynching rope; the freezing streets; the nursing home and prison."

"Will we remember and support Brenda and Wanda Hansen of Camp Sister Spirit, white, rural, working-class lesbians who are building and maintaining lesbian and feminist space in rural Mississippi, when the homophobic violence they face - dead dogs in their mailbox, gunfire at night - no longer makes the headlines?"

"The exclusivity of queer community shaped by urban, middle-class assumptions."

"I want each of us to be able to bring our queerness home."

"If we as a country are finally deciding, after five centuries of white-led cultural and environmental rampage across North America, to save the spotted owl and fragments of its habitat, then we as a people need to be accountable to the folks who will be unemployed, possibly homeless and hungry, because of that decision."

"Yes, Wal-Marts exist across the country. But the development of low-paying service jobs in national and multinational chain stores to the inevitable detriment of locally owned businesses will never be the answer to the economic crises in fishing and logging towns."

"I adore its defiant external edge, its comfortable internal truth. Queer belongs to me."

"I want to hear their stories, but like the stories of other marginalized people, they were most often never told, but rather eaten up, thrown away, lost in the daily grind of survival."

"Marginalized people from many communities create their own internal tensions and hostilities, and disabled people are no exception."

"The construction of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also upon the nondisabled body."

"The tension between the one who is shaking the world up and the one who simply wants an entrance into that world shadows many marginalized, politicized communities today."

"What if instead of fighting on behalf of the shrinking number of people who have jobs with health benefits to be able to share them with spouses, we fight for universal health care?"

"What if instead of fighting for family recognition for lesbian and gay parents through marriage, we fight to end the racist, classist, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic child welfare and family law systems that tear so many families and communities apart?"