Christopher Barzak > Quotes

“Don’t ever put your happiness in someone else’s hands. They’ll drop it. They’ll drop it every time.”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Sometimes you've got to be able to listen to yourself and be okay with no one else understanding.”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“The terrible thing about love is that it takes away your safety net, your balancing pole. Even the tightrope you walk upon will disappear beneath you, yet love expects you to keep walking anyway, arms outstretched, one foot after the other, on nothing more than air.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“I once heard my mother tell my sister love only comes at a price, there's no way around it. You give up parts of yourself for love, she said. If that's true, I thought, the cost of our love had risen. And despite wanting to be as real to you as you were to me, I couldn't afford us any longer. We were beyond my means.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Normal is a setting on a washing machine.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Only so much truth can exist between two people until it becomes too much, and then they can’t bear to be around each other.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction

“Real strength isn’t control. It’s knowing when to let go.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“As we walked the streets together, cups of bitter coffee warming our hands, the present told its story all around us. The present has no need for us to do anything except exactly what we're doing. It's the past and future that needs our voices in order to live. So as we walked, as you spoke of yourself and your family, as you spoke of your past, I began to think of the future. I began to put us into a story. What happens after that first night is where I live sometimes, when I can gather enough of us together again, and this is how it goes.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Here's the thing: we're all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in old children's magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together-at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, on the family room-until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That's us, that's anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World

“You’re like a candle in a dark room, throwing light backwards and forwards.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Uncharted territory,” I said. “The parts on the maps of our lives that we don’t understand. In cartographer’s language they call these places sleeping beauties.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“My heart was defective. It was defecting a little more each day.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“In Japan, people have something called their charm point. A coy smile, a twinkle in the eye, a faultless sense of humour, or a laugh no one has heard in the history of laughs before. The thing that makes others love you.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“You see, that’s what’s so odd, how everyone thinks they’re normal and the truth is no one in the world is normal at all. Isn’t that wonderful?”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“You're both treated fairly," she said, "but sometimes people require different things for true fairness.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World

“Here they were, the people we were becoming, about to knock on our front door, hoping they could undo the mistakes we were making at that very moment.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World

“Just two people in love.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World

“That’s what love hotels are for.”
“I know,” says Ai, “but this man comes alone. He says he comes to this room and thinks about the lovers who have been here before him, imagines himself as one of them, imagines himself having someone to hold. He tells whoever is reading this that he’s grateful for the love we share without knowing.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“Leaves fell around me, red and gold stars falling through the mist.”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“Everything about us was entirely normal, really. We were as ordinary as anything we might come across in this world.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World

“Small towns in remote corners of the world are really quaint, unless you don't fit into them. Then they're just small.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World

“I didn’t need to be liked or accepted. I needed to know and to accept myself.”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World

“Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he’d glow.”
― Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

“I’m just not sure anyone can describe what God is so easily. If I had my way, I’d take a bit of every religion and science and philosophy, because then maybe the picture of God would be more complete, like a mosaic. I think mostly people pick just one idea of God, but when they do that they end up looking at this one little speck of something that’s really big and amazing. They look at that one speck in the mosaic and say, “That’s God,” and don’t see the rest of the picture around it. But”
― Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

“Transformation is something that obsesses me. What is the soul? Is there a difference between something like a soul and something like a self? Is our identity something we construct, or is it organic and natural? There are all kinds of theories.”
― Christopher Barzak

“We spent the night smiling politely at each other through this glass barrier that felt like it had sprung up right behind my eyes. Like I was trapped inside myself, and the me who danced awkwardly with her on the floor was this stand-in, making dumb jokes while I beat against the glass wall, beat against it with my fists and then my head...”
― Christopher Barzak, Wonders of the Invisible World