"The world we live in is created and it’s been being created and it is still being created. So why can’t we take things that we assume are the building blocks of what we know about our lives, about every single thing that we trust, and turn them upside down just to be a bit more accommodating."

"I understand that it both is and is not my duty to deconstruct and then reconstruct my government’s views on the validity of citizens like me whom colonial constitutions factored out and vilified."

"One thing you will learn from a lifetime of biting your tongue; memories lose their flavors."

"Freedom will come when all Batswana can assume and inhabit whatever gender and other identities they are comfortable with."

"The core behind my work is to ensure that as Batswana we start discovering and learning from what we experience."

"To truly understand that attaining accessible education, accessible healthcare, and ending poverty, means ensuring that we are cognizant of the voices and lives of people like me; whether it's people who are brown skinned, African, Indigenous, Queer identifying, disabled"

"If there is any place I don't belong, it's in a mind where the story of me starts with the branch of me being queer and not with my rural roots."

"He wouldn’t be much of a diplomat if he couldn’t lie with a straight face."

"Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs."

"“You ever needed to disprove the existence of a Creator God,” he said, “the miracle of efficiency that the human body isn’t would be a fucking good place to start.”"

"“Cultural hegemony is based on conformity,” he said, after a pause long enough that she had expected to go unanswered. “Siege mentality. Look at oppressed philosophies, religions—or religions that cast themselves as oppressed to encourage that kind of defensiveness. Logic has no pull. What the lizard brain wants, the monkey brain justifies, and when things are scary, anything different is the enemy. Can come up with a hundred pseudological reasons why, but they all boil down to one thing: if you aren’t one of us, you’re one of them.”"

"“Hypocrite,” she said. But she laughed. “Doesn’t it get tiring being so damned morally superior all the time?”"

"I said, “It just seems weird that I’m in bed with somebody I’ve never met.” As I said it I realized how foolish it was. Anytime you’re in bed with somebody, you’re in bed with everybody who came before you—everybody who hurt them, healed them, shaped them. All those ghosts are in the room."

"Can you imagine a planet full of assholes who used to just…cut down trees?"

"Depression is realism."

"We need what we need. Judging ourselves doesn’t change it. Sometimes a hug and a cookie right now mean more than a grand gesture at some indeterminate point in the future."

"We claim the dignity of age, she thought, but the truth is, age leaves us without any dignity at all."

"And I admit, I don’t like dying very much myself. But I look forward to Death herself, once the dying is over."

"The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin."

"“Kill or be killed,” Vincent said, next best thing to a mantra."

"There were idiots on every planet who considered possession more important than morality."

"Kusanagi-Jones was long past feeling guilt about lying. Conscience was one of the first things to go. If he’d ever had much of one to begin with, the job had burned it out."

"Any government founded on a political or religious agenda more elaborate than “protect the weak, temper the strong” is doomed to tyranny."

"While it is true that notoriety offers certain benefits, it is not by any means confirmed that those benefits compensate for the disadvantages."

"The old have nothing to pace themselves for, she’d say. This is the final sprint. Run. Run. See how far you can get before you fall."

"Age had not yet defeated her on all fronts, though it was a war of attrition she knew she was fated to lose."

"The cornerstone role is a real challenge. But you can be certain that if you are gay or lesbian the Holy Spirit is calling you to take some steps in that direction, to be more open about your gayness, to be more open about the depth of your spiritual life. We must seek God's guidance because a cornerstone, after all, is a small, if essential, part of a building, the entirety of which is the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit waits on our freedom to invite her in to make use of our gifts and talents in bringing about the reign of God, a reign of justice and peace, a reign where God's glory is achieved through the fullness of life that all humans share, gay and straight alike."

"One's whole life can be caught up in this attitude with the result that the quality of life is destroyed. The high-school student waits for graduation; the college student waits for graduate school; the graduate student waits for a job; the worker waits for a vacation; the vacationer waits to go back to work; the veteran worker waits for retirement. Our whole life can be spent waiting for what comes next. Then death intervenes and in a way it can be said that we never really existed, because we never found time to do something for its own sake; that is to say, we never played."

"John J. McNeill was a Jesuit for nearly forty years before being expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1987 for his views on gay and lesbian sexuality. Since 1975 he has practiced psychotherapy in New York City. The Church and the Homosexual, also available from Beacon Press."

"In 20 years, you don't want to be famous. You want a sustained career."

"Any actor who thinks they're a sex symbol? Cringe."

"When you’re working with a genre like romance, which is about something fundamental which connects all humans, it’s so important that we can allow everyone to see themselves in that story, and that wasn't necessarily there for me growing up."

"I think there’s something incredibly sexy about consent generally."

"Leadership is about authenticity and transparency. And being there. Being there as much as you can. There's a fearlessness to it."

"[I loved] the romance genre being given this platform — it’s always been seen as quite a lightweight literature. Of course, it’s fluffy because it’s accessible and it’s hopefully something that you can bathe in. But at the same time, it can really tap into very human, very private and very high-stakes human experiences."

"There’s a lot of pressure on romance, I think, because you have to be so truthful. But that’s what you want, isn’t it? You just want to find the truth in everything."

"But with every job I’ve done that I’ve really enjoyed, I’ve never really ‘seen’ myself in it. If you can see yourself in something, you’ve probably already worked out your performance or the why. But if there’s that friction, then it means you’re going to come up with something new."

"He's quite open as a human being. I love him."

"It’s about redressing the balance of access to roles. There just aren’t that many gay roles, so when straight actors go to take that space up, it’s eliminating the chance for other [gay actors]. We know there has been a history of needing to be closeted to succeed and be famous, especially in acting. And the idea of not being able to believe heterosexual relations and narrative, if you know one of the actors is gay… everyone should be able to play absolutely everything. But let’s blow away all the cobwebs, and one of the hang-ups and shadows of the past is that we need to be a lot more open to the idea of sexes playing different sides. There have been amazing performances by straight people playing gay and by gay people playing straight."

"It is a private matter [sexuality], but if there are opportunities to say something . . . I wonder if, if it would be beneficial to someone else, that responsibility is on you. It’s complicated."

"I knew that I wanted to be visible about my sexuality, because in all the territories that Netflix goes out in, there might be a boy somewhere that goes, “Wait, what?” Which is what I didn’t have when I was young. All I know is that I’m happy to keep working really hard and if there are opportunities for representation, and to make that point, then that’s something I’ll always strive to do."

"Theatre has often saved the day for me and that’s why I’ll forever think I’m a theatre actor more than anything else."

"I’ve never doubted I would have children. It’s not something I’ve ever wavered on."