Quotes from Jennifer Finney Boylan

If I could imagine the past with compassion, why couldn't I breathe hope into an imagined future?

it's the same monkeys, different barrel.

But surely the idea that one might slip away unseen and take up another life is nearly universal. Is there anything more fundamentally human than the desire to live in another world, as someone other than our own earthbound selves?

Days in a house with children grind by like glaciers, but the years rush by like wind.

Briefly, I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn't quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy.

The women I knew in those days liked the fact that I had a feminine streak, that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn't know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto. A lot of straight women love a female sensibility in a man, an enthusiasm that goes right up to, but unfortunately does not quite include, his being an actual woman.

Each minute seemed like hours and hours. But then the years passed by like days.

I used to stand at the lectern in my coat and tie, waving my glasses around, urging students to find the courage to become themselves. Then I'd go back to the office and lock the door and put my head down on the desk.

That was the last time I saw Carol. I didn't want to be told I had to be a woman. What I wanted from her was the mystery to a solution.

that Victoria's wife has said that she will phone the police if Victoria ever so much as even mentions this topic again.

And yet, as it turns out, nothing is harder than loving human beings. In part, this is because we don't know what we want. Or, on those unlikely occasions when we do know what we want, we often don't know how to put our desire into words. Instead, a lot of the time we act like my old friend Gomer, snarling and slathering at the end of our chains, driven to fury not only by our imprisonment but also by the presence of others who appear to us to be undeservedly walking free.

No one leaped to his feet to rescue her. I think we all knew Grace well enough to understand that she would prefer to rescue herself from this predicament, and we were right.

We aren't here on earth in order to bend over backwards to resemble everyone else. We're here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved?

But there were times when I remembered my younger self the way you'd remember a dear friend you'd lost, for reasons you no longer quite understood.

and spoken my name for the first time.

If you've never experienced a sense of dysphoria with your own body, all I can say is, Lucky you. But just because you have not experienced this yourself does not mean it is not real in the hearts of others.

I learned the terrible truth that as we morph from self to self over time, the love that one self has sworn can seem unfathomable to another.

At every waking moment now, I was plagued by the thought that I was living a lie.

Is it? I thought. Is it really better if I talk about it? Isn't keeping this hidden the only way I can protect you, can protect this family? Isn't that my job, taking care of us? Sometimes you can do that better with silence than with words.

Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind—never, although my understanding of what it meant to be a boy, or a girl, was something that changed over time.

Barbara looked alarmed. "You mean you could have decided to be anybody?" "Not anybody, but the person I became. I think we are who we are because consciously, or unconsciously, we choose ourselves.

Sorry," I said. "They're great, but you know. The world doesn't revolve around breasts." "Listen to you!" Curly shouted. "Of course the world revolves around breasts! What else would it revolve around?

After six months of Premarin, I had another round of levels taken. I was found to have 59 nanograms of estrogen in my system. The average for an adult male is 6. The mean for females is 26.