Lgbt People

"I take it to be axiomatic that people are revolted by witnessing the shameless gratification of an appetite they do not share."

"To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody."

"Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep it obscured the way ahead. This hardly mattered. There were always others to look where I was going."

"Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice."

"The rest of the world in which I lived was still stumbling about in search of a weapon with which to exterminate this monster [homosexuality] whose shape and size were not yet known or even guessed at. It was thought to be Greek in origin, smaller than socialism but more deadly, especially to children."

"In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast."

"Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level."

"At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual, I'm transgender. I now accept that. I no longer see myself as homosexual, though it is a word I have used to describe myself and which others have understandably used to describe me. I don't actually see myself as a man though, of course, I know I'm not physically a woman. The only thing in my life I have wanted and didn't get was to be a woman. [...] I don't dress like a woman ... I think my body is too like a man's body to have lived as a woman with any kind of success. I refer to myself as homosexual without thinking because of how I have lived my life."

"A pinch of notoriety will do."

"I have come to think that both sex and politics are a mistake and that any attempt to establish a connection between the two is the greatest error of all."

"Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it."

"I suppose when I was a child, when I lived almost entirely in a dream world, I suppose I thought of myself as a woman, but later on you realise you have to live in the real world and that you are not. You are only in some senses effeminate or feminine, and you must make this compromise, you must learn to live in a world where statistically you are a man, whatever you may think about yourself. I didn't want to become anything. Once I'd accepted the world, all I wanted was that the world should understand what kind of person I was."

"“They [the Clutters] never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it's just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.”"

"not since the early work of Eudora Welty has there been an example of such striking literary virtuosity. Even if Mr. Capote were ten or twenty years older than he is, his powers of description and evocation, his ability to bend language to his poetic moods, his ear for dialect and for the varied rhythms of speech would be remarkable. In one so young this much skill represents a kind of genius. On the other hand, I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote's novel. In Mr. Capote's case, as with so many of our gifted contemporary artists, I would freely trade eighty percent of his technical skill for twenty percent more value in the uses to which it is put."

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."

"People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie. But in a friendship you don't do that. You do exactly the reverse. You try more and more to be as completely pure and straight as you can be."

"[You've said your material chooses you.] That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman—-the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote."

"Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right."

"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."

"All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love."

"I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff."

"In the disposition of capital cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months. [...] However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune [...]."

"“There is considerable hypocrisy in conventionalism. Any thinking person is aware of this paradox; but in dealing with conventional people it is advantageous to treat them as though they were not hypocrites. It isn't a question of faithfulness to your own concepts; it is a matter of compromise so that you can remain an individual without the constant threat of conventional pressures.”"

"“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”"

"“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.”"

"Envy was constantly with him; the Enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have."

"She had said she was afraid of Perry, and she was, but was it simply Perry she feared, or was it a configuration of which he was part [...]? The eldest, the brother she loved, had shot himself; Fern had fallen out of a window, or jumped; and Perry was committed to violence, a criminal."

"I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did. Know why? Because the sergeant we had was tough. Because I wouldn't roll over. Jesus, I hate that stuff. I can't stand it. Though—I don't know. Some queers I really liked. As long as they didn't try anything. The most worthwhile friend I ever had, really sensitive and intelligent, he turned out to be queer."

"“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”"

"Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it."

"But my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incomplete episodes"

"She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."

"Never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure."

"The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory."

"The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell."

"A resident of over a hundred years in so narrow a world deserved higher homage."

"It seemed odd to Joel that nature did not reflect so solemn an event: flowers of cotton-boll clouds within a sky as scandalously blue as kitten-eyes were offensive to their sweet disrespect."

"It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your IQ every year."

"Disco is the best floor show in town. It's very democratic, boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else, all in one big mix."

"At rejse er at leve."

"I think many would enjoy and savor the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen much better as adults. I recommend the miraculous translations by Tiina Nunnally."

"They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate."

"We sometimes live to three hundred years, but when we cease to exist here we only become the foam on the surface of the water, and we have not even a grave down here of those we love. We have not immortal souls,because Estelle is a star and we shall never live again; but, like the green sea-weed, when once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more. Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see."

"When he saw Tiny, he was delighted, and thought her the prettiest little maiden he had ever seen. He took the gold crown from his head, and placed it on hers, and asked her name, and if she would be his wife, and queen over all the flowers. This certainly was a very different sort of husband to the son of a toad, or the mole, with my black velvet and fur; so she said, "Yes," to the handsome prince. Then all the flowers opened, and out of each came a little lady or a tiny lord, all so pretty it was quite a pleasure to look at them. Each of them brought Tiny a present; but the best gift was a pair of beautiful wings, which had belonged to a large white fly and they fastened them to Tiny's shoulders, so that she might fly from flower to flower."

"I have now learnt to despise you," he said. "You refused an honest prince; you did not appreciate the rose and the nightingale; but you did not mind kissing a swineherd for his toys; you have no one but yourself to blame!"

"Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken."

"He felt himself melting away, but he still remained firm with his gun on his shoulder. Suddenly the door of the room flew open and the draught of air caught up the little dancer, she fluttered like a sylph right into the stove by the side of the tin soldier, and was instantly in flames and was gone. The tin soldier melted down into a lump, and the next morning, when the maid servant took the ashes out of the stove, she found him in the shape of a little tin heart. But of the little dancer nothing remained but the tinsel rose, which was burnt black as a cinder."

"I can give her no greater power than she has already," said the woman; "don't you see how strong that is? How men and animals are obliged to serve her, and how well she has got through the world, barefooted as she is. She cannot receive any power from me greater than she now has, which consists in her own purity and innocence of heart. If she cannot herself obtain access to the Snow Queen, and remove the glass fragments from little Kay, we can do nothing to help her."

"I have gone through the most terrible affair that could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real man, and that I am his shadow." "How very terrible,” cried the princess; "is he locked up?" "Oh yes, certainly; for I fear he will never recover." "Poor shadow!" said the princess; "it is very unfortunate for him; it would really be a good deed to free him from his frail existence; and, indeed, when I think how often people take the part of the lower class against the higher, in these days, it would be policy to put him out of the way quietly."

"Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all."