Quotes from Kenji Yoshino

No one has written adequately of what happens when enough of the body's naked surface is pressed against another human being's. It is a slow dismantling of ego, a suspension of the instinct to distinguish Me from Not Me.

Perhaps none of us assumes romantic love to be a birthright. Yet the confidence it will come surely admits of degrees. Growing up, I assumed I was the word that rhymed with none other-- like "silver" or "orange," glistering bright, but sonnet foiling, and always solitary traveling. Somewhere love happened, plausible as a catch of distant conversation. But not in the self's way.

Growing up, women were not the mystery—I knew how they worked, or thought I did. Men were the mystery, obscure in their violences and their lusts and their ability to catch. Yet for many years I didn't try to conform to "straight-acting" norms. I didn't think I could—and perhaps achieved an integrity in that surrender. Ironically,

I remember a biology lab in which we observed a spear-headed water worm. Like a starfish, it could grow back anything we razored off of it, even to the point of generating multiple versions of itself. I saw myself in that gliding shape. Arrow-shaped, it never arrived where it wanted to go. But it knew, when cut, to grow.

What is needed is not sight, but insight—I need to look at your visual "impairment" and infer that my own impairment might be the same or worse.

These are only words, not incisions or shocks, so their violence may be harder to see...a man's wrist lifts as he pours water from a pitcher, making it seem as if water, wrist, world, exist so this angle can be. A parallelogram of moonlight reads the bumps on his back as he sleeps in my arms. When I fix on these images, I know that to transform the desire they embody into loathing would be a violence as sure as a knife across a painting

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

Peter Brook's production with Laurence Olivier as Titus was one of the great theatrical experiences of the 1950s