Quotes from Jennifer Finney Boylan

The line between male and female turns out to be rather fine. Although we imagine our genders as firm and fixed, in fact they are as malleable as a sand castle.

As it turns out, we're all still learning to be men, or women, all still learning to be ourselves. pg 197

Maybe . . . it's easier to have enemies than not to have them. . . . If you don't hate people, you have to learn to like them. . . . And liking people? That's not easy.

I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

I think it's very human, the hope that an all-encompassing love will change us into someone else, someone better. That this hope usually turns out to be false makes it no less human; the world is full of hopes far more unlikely than being transformed by love.

Maybe we should just love one another, even if we don't completely understand the things that people bear in their dark, strange hearts, even if the stars that other men and women are following seem invisible to us. If we make ourselves open to the humanity of others first, maybe understanding will follow. An incomprehensible theory of the universal isn't necessary if your only ambition is to embrace another soul. What you need, maybe all you need, in fact, is the willingness to love.

Monster a person though monster not human. Monster like music. Like Beatles! Like Schumann! World full of stupid. World full of noise. Monster feel ANGRY. No birthday. No joys. World full of JUNK monster not comprehend. What is a childhood? What is a friend? Monster and human both want the same. Want conversation. Want love. WANT NO PAIN. If monster speak heart: monster life only worsen. Monster not human: BUT MONSTER A PERSON!

a memoir is meant to be an impression of life, and not a photograph.

I feel like somebody who just got out of prison after 40 years for something she didn't do, like I got pardoned by the governor. When dear friends deal with me with mixed emotions, it is a little like being told, 'Well, Jenny, we're glad you got sprung, really, but quite honestly we did kind of like you better when you were in jail.

It's funny how you can know a person, think of him as your closest friend, and still never gain access to the secret chambers in his heart.

You carry the past with you. Even if there's a before, and an after, in your life. It's still the same life. The trick is to build a bridge between that and what comes later.

Anybody can buy. It takes an artist to shop.

Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved? Why is it that what is so obvious to dogs is such a mystery to men and women?

Is there anything more fundamentally human than the desire to live in another world, as someone other than our own earthbound selves?

There are times when I think it's impossible to know another soul. I don't know, maybe we're lucky that way. If we knew what really went on inside other people's private hearts it would make our eyeballs bleed.

And at every moment as I lived my life, I countered this awareness with an exasperated companion thought, namely, Don't be an idiot. You're not a girl. Get over it. But I never got over it.

Which is to say that we all have dragons to slay in life. This one is mine. I hope that doing so will provide a model to others on how to find the bravery to be true to oneself, even if it means doing something that seems impossible.

It makes me wonder just how many supposedly brave people in the world are just men and women trying to imitate someone more courageous than themselves.

The problem is - we own our lives, sure. But our lives don't belong only to us. And yet, we are here to tell our stories in this way to make sense of our lives. So how do you tell a story when you know that telling it will bring other people sorrow? Is it better, in the end, to just be silent?

Straight women love a feminine sensibility in a man, but that love only goes up to, and unfortunately does not quite pass, the fact of his being an actual woman.

Having an opinion about transsexuality is about as useful as having and opinion on blindness. You can think whatever you like about it, but in the end, your friend it still blind and surely deserves to see.

Sometimes my sister and I laugh so hard that we fall upon the floor, unable to speak or move, just shaking so hard that it is not clear if we are going to be able to survive our own happiness. It makes it hard to breathe.

gay and lesbian people don't necessarily have that much in common with transsexuals." "Yeah," I said. "Except for the fact that we get beaten up by the same people.

Most of the time I just have to resign myself to the fact that this whole business is beyond comprehension for most straight people. If you're not trans, you're free from thinking about what gender you are in the same way that white people in America are generally free from having to think about what race they are.