Michael Nava > Quotes

“You know, Henry, we're the only people who get born into the enemy camp. I mean, black babies get born into black families, Jewish babies get born into Jewish families, but gay babies, we get born into straight families. How we survive it all is a miracle.”
― Michael Nava, The Hidden Law

“I'm sorry about today."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"I was bored and lonely."
"Some would call that the human condition.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Bad feelings have a life of their own.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“We had not liked each other much at first. He mistook my shyness for arrogance and I failed to see that his arrogance masked his shyness.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Only very young people believe that change is always for the better.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“People are basically screwed-up and often the best you can do for them is listen, hear the worst and then tell it's not so bad.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“And what right do you have to judge me? He was nothing to you but a drink."
"No," I said. "I loved him."
She looked away from me. A moment later she said, "I have never understood homosexuality. I can't picture what you men do with each other."
"I could tell you but it would completely miss the point.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Grief is half of justice," she said, and added, a moment later, "the other half is a hope.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Is that why you do good deeds, Richie? To shorten your time in Purgatory?' 'Oh, honey,' he said, brushing lint from an orange sleeve. 'I'm going to hell. That's where the action is.”
― Michael Nava, The Burning Plain

“Her work was indeed elliptical, she left out everything that was essential, including logic and meaning. Her words neither described nor observed things. They were just words scattered across the page. This was braininess of the highest order, the verbal equivalent of the white canvas passed off as a painting; so abstract that to have expected some sense from it would have insulted the artist.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“It doesn't have to mean anything to you to mean something to me.”
― Michael Nava, Goldenboy

“Every choice closes doors ,” I said, “and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they’re surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did. I don’t invite unhappiness, Aaron. Avoiding conflict may not be the noblest principle, but it works for me.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“When I got to San Francisco that afternoon, it was one of those days that arrives at the end of summer just as the last tourists are leaving complaining about the cold and fog.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“La petite mort - that's what the French called orgasm. They believed that semen is sort of concentrated blood so that each time a man came he shortened his life a little by spilling blood that couldn't be replenished."
"And women?"
"Then, as now, men didn't much concern themselves with how women felt.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“I was a good lawyer , and most days that was enough. I was aware, however, that I took refuge in my profession, as unlikely as that seemed considering the amount of human suffering I dealt with. It offered me a role to escape into, from what I no longer knew; perhaps nothing more significant than my own little ration of suffering.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“and a line from Emily Dickinson that had been running through my head for months: “Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.”
― Michael Nava, The Burning Plain

“Honey, if you’re going to take sex advice from a bunch of men in dresses, I’d choose drag queens over priests. At least drag queens have had sex.”
― Michael Nava, Carved in Bone

“Grief is half of justice," she said, and added, a moment later, "the other half is hope.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Your mind lives in fear and regret but your body can only live right now, in this moment. So, take some deep breaths and live in your body. It's a safer place to be than in your head.”
― Michael Nava, Carved in Bone

“How do you deal with the God talk?”

I sipped my coffee and thought about how to frame a sensible answer to a difficult question. “By atheist I mean I don’t believe there’s an old man sitting on a throne in the sky keeping a list of my virtues and my vices either to torture or reward me when I die. What’s kept me going is the kindness, or maybe I should say the love, that I got in the program. That and a sense of my own truth about who I am and what matters to me. When my sponsor coaxed those admissions out of me, he said, well, there’s your God, love and self-acceptance. That’s enough for me. I don’t worry about what anyone else means by God.”
― Michael Nava, Lies with Man

“There comes a point in the career of every criminal defense lawyer when he realizes that what keeps him in practice are his prejudices not his principles. Suspicion of authority and contempt for the platitudes with which injustice too often cloaks itself can take you a long way but, ultimately, they are no substitute for the simple faith that what you are doing is right.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Have you ever heard of a poet named Cavafy?” I told him no. “A Greek poet. Gay, in fact. He wrote a poem about a young dissolute man who tires of his life and resolves to move to a new city and mend his ways. The poet’s comment is that moving away is futile because, having ruined his life in one place, he has ruined it everywhere.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“If the law was a temple, it was built on human misery and jails were the cornerstones.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“He was also a burglar and an informant and his one great fear was coming to trial and being sentenced to time at the state prison in Folsom. Several of his ex-associates were there, thanks to his help. I had just been granted a further continuance of his trial, delaying it for another sixty days. Our strategy was to string out his case as long as possible so that when he inevitably pled guilty he would be credited with the time he served in county jail and avoid Folsom altogether. The district attorney’s office was cooperative; the least they owed him was county time—easy time, the prisoners called it. County was relatively un-crowded and the sheriffs relatively benign. On the other hand, county stank like every other jail I’d ever been in.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad. I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic. Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet. The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky. The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the corners of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there. I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Actually,” he said, “that brings me to the subject of this meeting, your future.”

“It’s secure as long as there’s crime in the streets.”

“There’s crime in the boardrooms, too, Henry. My firm is interested in hiring an associate with a criminal law background. I’ve circulated your name. People are impressed.”

“Why would your firm dirty its hands in criminal practice?” Gold put his coffee cup down and said, “Corporations consist of people, some of whom are remarkably venal. Others still are just plain stupid. Anyway, they’ve come to us often enough needing a criminal defense lawyer to make it worth our while to hire one. We’d start you as a third-year associate, at sixty thousand a year.”

I answered quickly, “Well, thanks for thinking of me, but I’m not interested.”

Gold said, “Look, if it’s the money, I know you deserve more, but that’s just starting pay.”

“You know it’s not the money, Aaron,” I said, reflecting that the sum he named was almost double my present wage.

He sighed and said, “Henry, don’t tell me it’s the principle.” I said nothing. “You’re wasting yourself in the public defender’s office. You knock yourself out for some little creep and what you get in return is a shoebox of an office and less money than a first-year associate at my firm makes.”

“So I should exchange it for a bigger office and more money and the opportunity to defend some rising young executive who gets busted for drunk driving?”

“Why not? Aren’t the rich entitled to as decent a defense as the poor?”

“You never hear much public outcry over the quality of legal representation of the rich.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices because one cannot own anything permanently; we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfillment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who’d been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide.”
― Michael Nava, The Death of Friends

“We stood facing each other, but it seemed absurd to shake hands, so we just smiled, like two strangers who had collided by accident.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“patio. From where I stood, he looked like a figure projected on a screen, luminous, distant and larger than life. He seemed to me at that moment the sum of every missed opportunity in my life. I let the feeling pass.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death

“Paris looked back at me without expression. The silence went on for a second too long. “You’re gay,” he said.

Still looking into his eyes, I said, “Yes, I am.”

“I didn’t think so at first.”

“What gave me away?”

“You didn’t react at all when I mentioned my boyfriend. You didn’t even blink. Straight men always give themselves away.”
― Michael Nava, The Little Death