Brandon Taylor > Quotes

“There are no bad people,” Wallace says with a shrug. “People do bad things. But after a while they’re just people again.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Overhead, trees dappled in sunlight. You can’t know how beautiful the sun is there, how it touches everything and soaks it through, succulent, like water, like moisture. Light beading on the skin, dew, glistening. So much light, an ocean of it, a sea of light spread across everything.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“My brother once called me a hard person. I think he meant that I am a person who does not forgive. This is true. I find it difficult to forgive people who have done harm to me. I am this way out of necessity, because if I do not remember the harm done to me, then no one will, and the boy that I was will have no one to look out for him.”
― Brandon Taylor, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“At times like this when two people he liked very much did not like each other, Noah wondered what to make of the pernicious nature of loyalty. You couldn’t be all things to all people, and any friendship contained such microbetrayals.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They'd seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would. It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon's head peering down in judgment. What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone?”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans: A Novel

“Pressure gathered in the backs of his eyes.
Oh, he thought when he realised what it was: tears.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“¿Qué es el amor si lo obtienes de segunda mano? ¿Es un hecho o tan solo un detalle?”
― Brandon Taylor

“I imagine that there are ways in which our bodies never really stop being our mothers' bodies. In the bath, I trace my fingers along the lines of myself like a person following a river to its source. When I laugh like her or when I'm mean like her or when I go cold and distant like her, I can feel her lingering, ready to claim what is hers and has always been hers.”
― Brandon Taylor, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I didn’t know much about God and the devil except what you shouldn’t do to invite one or the other, but I knew that I wanted to be full of one, and if it couldn’t be the one I wanted, then I would take the other. That if God wanted nothing to do with me, then I’d take the devil. I’d take him on my knees where I’d taken the men, let him pull me down in a bed of kudzu and fuck me, so long as I wasn’t empty anymore. I’d keep a tiny God inside me, and one day I might lie down and let the ants take me.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappiness, is perhaps all that connects them. Only the prospect of greater unhappiness keeps them within the circumscribed world of graduate school.”
― Brandon Taylor , Real Life

“This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life. (From Real Life.)”
― Brandon Taylor

“There comes a time when you have to stop being who you were, when you have to let it go if you're going to keep moving, if you're going to survive, because the past doesn't need a future. It has no use for what comes next. The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don't hold it back, if you don't dam it up, it will spread and take and drown.

The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past cates us. You can't live as long as your past does. It's one or the other.”
― Brandon Taylor

“If it was easy to get over your mother discarding you, then the whole world would be a different and stranger place. That hurt had a weight to it, a gravity as essential as the Earth's...”
― Brandon Taylor

“Kindness is a debt, Wallace thinks. Kindness is something owed and something repaid. Kindness is an obligation.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“What a cruel fact of the world, that you could live your whole life in sight of what you want most and still find yourself unable to attain it, because of some vicious quirk.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans: A Novel

“Es extraño, en realidad, que para comprender lo que te ha lastimado, debas confiar en que no te lastimará cuando dejes que te habite.”
― Brandon Taylor

“La verdad es lo que emerge de la cuidadosa disposición de los detalles. Hecho es la palabra que usamos para describir un detalle que tiene una relación particular con la verdad.”
― Brandon Taylor

“This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things.”
― Brandon Taylor

“Je ne peux pas vivre tant que vit mon passé. C'est lui ou moi.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“The summer he turned seventeen, Ivan remembered, he had lain awake in his bed, thinking how stupid it all seemed. To have given so much and to have tried so hard, only to come up against the hard fact of biology. He had lain in bed for hours and hours that summer, burning up with anger, until he vibrated with it. What a cruel fact of the world, that you could live your whole life in sight of what you want most and still find yourself unable to attain it, because of some vicious quirk.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes do with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one's life.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Child prodigies got pickled by their talent and rendered emotionally childlike for the rest of their lives. Too much expectation at too early an age gave an air of premature maturity that later in life turned out to be immaturity.”
― Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures

“We scent a tragedy in the air and we try to trace it--not to its source, but to those most affected. We try to make sense of it by watching them grapple with it.”
― Brandon Taylor

“No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pas for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“...Besides, it was the novelty of the act that they enjoyed so much, and that was worth something.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Sometimes what she thinks is that she'd like nothing from life except to be free to change her mind at any moment. She'd like freedom from having to feed herself or buy clothes or pay bills, material freedom. But she does not have that. So she is returning to her parents, where she will work at a corner store and save up money to move to New York. Everyone saves and scrimps just to suffer and struggle so that they can say that they lived, that they tried. How stupid. How stupid. How stupid.”
― Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans

“The speakers are not merely delivering abstract notions of life; they move among particular forests at particular times of the day and year.”
― Brandon Taylor, Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes