Gregory Coles > Quotes

“The more our language evolved to express the truth of the world as we saw it, the less our ears could understand anything except the words of those who already agreed with us.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“Choosing a word was the same as choosing a side. Without choosing a side, it became impossible to speak at all.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“When the root of our shame is willingly chosen and shared, it loses its power to shame us. It is no longer shame at all.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“The way Jesus tells it, if we give up on belonging in order to follow him, we’ll find ourselves belonging anyway, as if by accident, in spite of ourselves. We might not belong the way other people do, with normal homes and normal families and normal ways of fitting in. But we’ll belong in a way that’s a hundred times better, fully in place because we know we are out of place. We’ll belong in all the weirdest ways, finding family among strangers, making homes out of tents that are better than mansions. We’ll belong like aliens.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“Abraham’s faith is exemplary precisely because he’s still a stranger at the end of the story. Even the land he’s buried on has to be bought specifically for that purpose, because no piece of the promised land belongs to him. His faith is a foreigner’s faith, an unsexy faith, a faith that’s terrible for boosting attendance or tithing numbers. Instead of taking him all the way home, Abraham’s faith takes him only as far as the promise of home.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“Sometimes I fall asleep and dream about a world like that. I dream about a world where I’m madly in love with Jesus and with another guy. At first the other guy and I are pursuing celibacy together, but then we change our minds and get married and have adventures and grow old together. But even in the middle of the dream, I don’t quite believe it.” “Why not? Couldn’t you do all those things if you wanted to?” “When I look into the eyes of my imaginary husband, I realize it’s not really him I’m in love with. I’m in love with the guy from the beginning of the dream, the guy who’s so passionately in love with the Jesus of the Bible that he would rather deny himself for his entire life than risk breaking his Savior’s heart. I’m in love with the guy willing to face the costs of celibacy. If he becomes someone else, I become less eager to marry him.”
― Gregory Coles, Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity

“Straight men don’t face the struggle I face, and I envy them for that. But they too often miss out on the chance to know other men deeply. The “masculinity” they’ve learned from society teaches them to hold one another at a distance, to befriend with bravado instead of with sincerity. My gay heart knows by instinct what so many straight men must fight to learn: that men were designed to know one another deeply, to be intimate, to love with a love that isn’t afraid of looking unmasculine.”
― Gregory Coles, Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity

“Cyborg is what I and my people call your race.”
“My race? You mean the human race?”
“Yes, precisely. The human race.”
Kanan took in a long breath and coughed at the dryness in her throat. “Why don’t you just call us human?”
“Because,”said Tiqvah, turning away, “human is what we call ourselves.”
“We can’t both be human.”
“No. It seems not.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“Our humanity ends where our words about humanity end. Without a name, we have nothing to lose and nothing to grieve.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“We became friends, close friends, closer friends. We shared secrets. My heart felt more whole when I was with him. When we were apart, I thought about him. I was in love. Doomsday was upon us. And then, to my surprise, doomsday never came. As our relationship grew stronger and deeper, it became more life-giving. I loved him (in a messy, don’t-try-this-at-home-kids kind of way), and he loved me (though rather differently, I assumed), and it was strange and wonderful and at the same time perfectly ordinary. The fact that I was drawn to him in too many ways—that I had to struggle not to make him the object of my fantasies—that made things even more complicated. But it was worth the struggle to love and be loved deeply.”
― Gregory Coles, Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity

“It's human nature, I think—it's certainly my nature, at any rate—to try to iron all the wrinkles out of life. When we feel like we don't belong, we try to solve the problem by making things a little more uniform, a little more ordinary. We take what we've been told are the best bits of other people's lives and set them as the preconditions for our own satisfaction. We search for home by enforcing someone else's vision of what the word home means. Along the way, we overlook the quirky beauty within the wrinkles, the beauty has always belonged to us and only us. If we want to find our place in the world, we have to let our lives be particular, personal, idiosyncratic. We have to live like we're fearfully and wonderfully made, like we're God's wabi-sabi works of art. How could we possibly belong on someone else's terms when we weren't made to fit in any other body, any other story but our own?”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“If worlds can change, then words must change.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“Sometimes our words become so familiar that we forget what they mean.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“One of these days, I’ll die and pass into a new kind of life. I’ll look again into the face of the One who has been my protection, my nutrition, my oxygen. Maybe, when that next birthday comes, I won’t be so afraid to say goodbye. Leaving the womb, after all, is just the beginning of the story.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“Truth must be a fragile thing if it only survives in one language.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World

“In language, everything lost is also something gained. Everything gained is also something lost. Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.”
― Gregory Coles, The Limits of My World