Quotes from Christopher Barzak

Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he'd glow.

I didn't need to be liked or accepted. I needed to know and to accept myself.

He was all surface, written on by those who'd pass him, like a love hotel diary.

Jarrod frowned like he felt bad for me, and I thought I saw maybe even a hint of tears in his eyes, like he was attending the funeral of a good friend who had died in an accident, and was looking down at his dead body, thinking, That's not him, the way I'd thought when I saw my grandmother in her casket, all made up with colors she'd have never chosen for herself had she been alive.

Being in love isn't irrational, he said. It only looks like that to people who have never felt it.

Transformation is something that obsesses me. What is the soul? Is there a difference between something like a soul and something like a self? Is our identity something we construct, or is it organic and natural? There are all kinds of theories.

Peace wasn't what I found when I did finally fall into sleep, though. A strange dream came instead. It wasn't one of mine, though, I could tell immediately. Maybe it belonged to someone in my family, or maybe to someone nearby. I had no idea. But wherever the dream came from, it swooped into my room on dark feathers, plucked me up like a baby, and carried me away to another world, where the peace of sleep did not exist.

I yearned for these other worlds where magic empowers people who understood it because I wanted to change my world, my place in it. I wanted to either be more visible, seen for who I am in my entirety and respected for it... or else I wanted to be even more invisible, protected from a world that would attempt to destroy me if others knew I was unlike them. That I was other. That I was queer

I really do feel like I was born to write and tell stories.

Small towns in remote corners of the world are really quaint, unless you don't fit into them. Then they're just small.

Philip K. Dick could have been Japanese. He seemed to know a lot about how the world is never what it looks like. That's pretty much Japan through and through.

I then fell asleep fast. Fell being the key word. Fell into the place called sleep, where we rest. Where we find peace for a little while.

An afternoon drive down back roads, looking for something I couldn't put a name to. A route to some place where maybe my true life existed.

We spent the night smiling politely at each other through this glass barrier that felt like it had sprung up right behind my eyes. Like I was trapped inside myself, and the me who danced awkwardly with her on the floor was this stand-in, making dumb jokes while I beat against the glass wall, beat against it with my fists and then my head...