Maybe we could all take care of each other, I dreamed.

Sophie knew about power animals,everyone did...Sophie thought she might be a cat, she liked cats a lot.

I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse.

She was just so sad. Her whole face hung with it, like sadness was her personal gravity.

I was so sad that day. My heart was trying to climb from my body.

Did anyone think this canon of druggie men were out of control? Only in the most admirable of ways! Out of control like a shaman or a space explorer, like a magician sawing himself in half. Out of control like a poet.

and give me insults, give meeconomic discrimination, give methe darkened parking lot of a windowless queer bar, give me fleets of bigots and books bannedin libraries across america, feed the worldwith lies about my life and plop a secondhelping of oppression on my plateand thank you for not making me straight.

It smelled of oily flowers, like the worn pillowcases of long-ago lovers.

How many lovers did a person need, anyway?

I wanted her so badly, my heart hung out of my chest like some hound-dog's tongue, pant, pant.

Michelle felt that if people didn’t like the way they looked in her book then they should have behaved differently.

i was really into communal living and we were all /such free spirits, crossing the country we were /nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class....and it’s just so cool / how none of them have hang-ups about / sex work they’re all real / open-minded real / revolutionary you know / the legal definition of pimp is / one who lives off the earnings of / a prostitute, one or five or / eight and i’d love to stay and / eat some of the stir fry i’ve been cooking / for y’all but i’ve got to go fuck / this guy so we can all get stoned and / go for smoothies tomorrow, save me / some rice, ok?

Michelle had great admiration for criminals and crime, though only from a distance.

She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once.

This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.

You can’t get lost if you have nowhere to be.

Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.

Our lives make awesome stories, especially if you don't get too attached to the thread of your own narrative.

She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.

It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.

The world was fucked up. It was hard to say how exactly, but we could feel it. There was injustice, lots of it, we saw it as a dull shape coming into focus.

You can’t let the apocalypse rule your life.