Paul Monette > Quotes

“Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.”
― Paul Monette

“Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”
― Paul Monette

“Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slanted yellow light.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.”
― Paul Monette

“Don't let anyone tell you that the truth can't disappear. If I believe in anything, rather than God, is that I am part of something that goes all the way back to Antigone, and that whatever speaks the truth of our hearts can only make us stronger. Can only give us the power to counter the hate and bigotry and heal this addled world.
Just remember: You are not alone.”
― Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

“Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slant of yellow light.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“You need only to have glimpsed it once to know there's a window out of all this black and sleepless night. Then you must use it to hope on. Key to the dream country where all your people are whole again, and the gunboats can't reach you, and the Empire of Hate is rubble. You and your secret dream of freedom are the tidal wave. Keep watch, every night if you have to. As for sleeping, you can sleep when you're dead.”
― Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

“We queers of Revelation hill...died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don't pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.”
― Paul Monette

“Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the faithful whipped up to a frenzy of witch-hunting and fag-bashing.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, Cesar gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“The pain between them made me as envious as their laughter, because it was real and expressible, blood-red with passion, and not the invisible pain of a ghost like me. Sometimes my head filled with a scream that went on for hours but was silenced by the walls of the closet. My face still wearing its social smile fixed in place as if by a stroke.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“There is no God, I'm sure of that. But the more they've sought me out, the more I am convinced that there are holy men and women. So I send blessings, such as they are, to all my priests who constitute the Resistance. Down with the fur and the edicts. And if they like, they're welcome to include me in their prayers. Can't hurt. None of us will free the world of intolerance alone. We need people of God, especially if He isn't here.”
― Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

“The struggle for true openness and intimacy is a lifelong struggle for all of us, gay and straight alike. And besides, a difficult life brings you to the core of yourself, where you learn what justice is and how it has to be fought for.”
― Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

“I suppose we’d been waiting for each other all our lives.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you've kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“To experience love as claustrophobia. In such a twisted paradigm lies the sick legacy of a lifetime in the closet.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“It was the first time I'd ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“That would be my theme, I thought: once I came out, the world was all windows.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over my guys, the gay and the straight and the in-between. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don't chastise myself for halving the world into us and them. I know that the good guys aren't all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.”
― Paul Monette

“Though gay men have begun to understand it is something in themselves these upright men so fear, too many of us have internalized their self-hatred as shame. That the flesh and the spirit are one in love is none of the business of the celibate men of God, especially those who believe they rule the province of love. But the mission of the homophobe is more pernicious even than his morality. He wants every one of us to be all alone, never to find the beloved friend.
A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods’ own fury of luck to get two people to meet. But when it finally happens, two men in love can’t rejoice out loud—joy of the very thing everyone burns for—without bracing for the rant of prophets, the schoolyard bully, and Rome’s “intrinsic evil.” I try to remember that we fight as a ragged people to outlast the calamity so that others can sleep as safe as my friend and I, like a raft in the tempest.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“If later on, as we read this, we might think “How happy we were then!” at least we’ll have that. That as we lived them, these moments, we knew they were important, and that’s all there is.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir