R.O. Kwon > Quotes

“Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I believe that we, in the attempt to live, invented Him. But if I could, I'd ask Him to give you everything.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I'd have no space left to fit my own.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“Phoebe, you’re a capable girl, but I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“By the time I quit, I realized I’d rather have no talent than just enough to know how much I lacked.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“all she wants is to be loved totally, without reason or question or sacrifice. Love is her hands above her head. Love is a riding crop, a whip, a knotted red rope—all things that force her to relinquish the control with which she tightly grips the world.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn't forget was the joy I'd known, loving Him.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“Masculinity was a glass vase perpetually at the edge of the table.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“Most men would only see bodily fluids when they caught their ejaculate in their hands, or if their life ended at the wrong end of a brawl. but for women, gore was a unit of measurement: monthly cycles, the egg-white slip of arousal, the blood of virginity stolen through force of hand or the force of law, childbirth, fists splitting the skin of the skull, the leak of milk, tears.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“Worse yet, he blundered from the start, asking her why she felt she needed to be hurt. “Why are people gay?” she shot back, suddenly unshy. “Why does anyone have a foot fetish? One of my earlier memories is of looking up words related to—to this, in the dictionary. It just happens, you know?”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“In a disembodied floating space, S/m offers little pockets of theatricality and connection. So long as they are playing, two people are totally accountable and listening to each other. S/m radically preempts romantic love because it is a practice of it.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“Kink proves that our desires, no matter how dark they are deemed, are always worthy of being named.” —BRONTEZ PURNELL, author of 100 Boyfriends”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“They were like two-thirds of a bar joke: he was an ex-Pentecostal, she was an ex-Catholic, and though she'd been with him for three years, she still refused to let him in the bathroom if she was so much as taking a piss.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“She knows that a small, soft animal lives inside her, and that animal wants to be loved completely, flat on its back, kissed and cuddled. She wants that [...]
- LARISSA PHAM, AUTHOR OF "Trust”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“She did not watch pornography; she thought about stopping him as soon as the sex became boring to her.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“I’ve wondered if I’ve stopped being able to want, but maybe it’s just that what I most wish to have again is not, at this point, available.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“In Life magazine in 1963, James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“You can't get enough of something you don't need.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“This was the thing about being an ex-Christian: like that, your life expectancy went from eternity to seventy-odd years. A death sentence on you and on those you loved. He tried not to think about it; he thought about it all the time.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“It seems to me that you are less interested in actually being vulnerable with others and more enamored with the symptoms of your own vulnerability, he wrote.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“Sasha wants me to take her somewhere--a place she has no vocabulary for--a place neither of us has been.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“You can’t get enough of a thing you don’t need.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“joke. I hadn’t talked much with Liesl, but I would: in time, she’d confide in me, as well. The dad she’d idolized, who left; the men like beads on the string of a furious mother’s life. The anorexic spells. She’d been locked up in a clinic. Obliged to eat, to weigh in. Like a pig for the kill, she said.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“you’re a capable girl, but I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“And he knows now that he cannot turn back. That he is responsible for this, for her, for making her think that she could trust him, that she could open her heart to him. And he realizes now that he has not stopped to consider, at any moment, the shape of his own heart, if it is a flower or a lock or a door, and if it is a door if that door is closed or open.”
― R.O. Kwon, Kink: Stories

“That night, I told my mother I had no option but to quit the piano. I won't be delusional, I said. I didn't have the talent. It wasn't enough to be good. I could see no point in devoting this life to music if I wouldn't add to what leading pianists, the ones I idolized, had achieved. I shouldn't waste time trying.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“I kissed bitten nails that shine, in hindsight, like quartz, spoils I pulled down from the moon.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“It's often all people want, urging a change: be like me, shaped in this image.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

“It must have been so hard, though, she said, expanding. She intended to sympathize, I could tell, and it was true: I'd tried not to leave the faith. I'd had such purpose, living in single-minded pursuit of the God I loved, until the afternoon I knelt in my bedroom, asking one last time for a sign. White gauze curtains rippled. I waited, but I heard nothing else. Muscles stiff, I got up. I should, I think, have told Phoebe how cut open I felt since then, with a God-shaped hole I didn't know how to fill. If I was sick of Christ, it was because I hadn't been able to stop loving Him, this made-up ghost I still grieves as though He'd been real.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries