Quotes from Paul Monette

I want the two million—or the five million, depending on whose scenario piques your fancy—to have themselves tested and know, so I will have people to talk to. Because after midnight and during weekends I cannot talk to those who play at business as usual.

I live in what's left of the evidence not out there in the rotting garden the firebombed street and Plato's myth of lovers the fates meeting of equal halves is a tale for lonely kids

I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.

We are creatures of the cruelties we witness.

Secrets upon secrets. Thus by inexorable degrees does the love that dares not speak its name build walls instead, till a house is nothing but closets.

Wouldn't you like right now to last forever?' Roger said as we lolled on the picnic slope. The afterglow of it lasted for days, for we bragged about it as if we'd just ascended K-2.

Grief is madness-ask anyone who's been there. They will tell you it abates with time, but that's a lie. What drowns you in the first year is a force of solitude and helplessness exactly equal in intensity to the love you had for the one who's gone. Equally passionate, equally intimate. The spaces between the the stabs of pain grow longer after a while, but they're empty spaces. The chich?(c)s of condolence get you back to the office.

As an artist, you reach for the pen that's full of blood.

That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse.

Being different was about something more than just our dicks.

So I told myself I would give it up, even prayed at night for it to be taken away, not knowing that 'it' was love.

Lust and the English make no sense to me.

I liked being adrift in symbols, beauty for beauty's sake.

That the flesh and the spirit are one in love is none of the business of the celibate men of God, especially those who believe they rule the province of love.

A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods' own fury of luck to get two people to meet.

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.

Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.

Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slanted yellow light.

The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.

It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.

Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.

When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

Don't let anyone tell you that the truth can't disappear. If I believe in anything, rather than God, is that I am part of something that goes all the way back to Antigone, and that whatever speaks the truth of our hearts can only make us stronger. Can only give us the power to counter the hate and bigotry and heal this addled world. Just remember: You are not alone.

We queers of Revelation hill...died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don't pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.