Ted > Ted's Quotes

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I want to take myself apart into something else, and if I cannot do that, I want to destroy every part of it that could ever be used against me.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“I want to peel off all my skin, if only so I could be anything other than a naked body, something horrifying instead of vulnerable. Nobody looks at a pig corpse and thinks it could be made beautiful.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“My name is Daphne.'
Daphne?
In that moment, it's as if I've peeled the skin away from the chest of a patient, revealing a beating heart. A boy could not say that name as if terrified the syllables will break in the mouth. A boy-born-boy could not recognize what I am.
Of course her name is Daphne.
I stand up straight, taking a step from the door; and then another, and another.
She's like me.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“For a moment, I almost say yes. But the wording isn't quite right. There's a difference. I remember the feeling in my stomach whenever my family passed advertisements for performances at the West End Theater, showing women dressed as men. I remember Father's newspapers - the sensationalist ones he bought for fun on the weekends - languishing over bizarre stories of "female husbands" and cross-dressing. I remember desperately wanting to be something other than what I was.

I don't want to be a boy.
I already am.

And the world will do anything to stop you.

"I think it just takes some boys longer than others to figure it out," I say.”
― Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

“There is no particular way to describe what I was intuiting around me. Maybe there isn't a term for a sense of loss when you don't know what you're missing.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“I found myself taking more risks, because failure had a second life — it could spin a yarn. There was an agency in the retelling, in the self-deprecation and of course self-mythologizing. Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Disassociation is a gay ritual as much as any other.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“the queer archive is ‘fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“I am a participant in an archaeology of looking, of cruising.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“It used to be our home: the comment stayed with me. Was it my home --- did it used to be?”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Fuck? What's the matter, Henry? You never heard that word before? Isn't that what you do to my sister every night?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“how do you tell your mom that she got your body wrong when she made you?”
― Chris Bergeron, Valide

“i saw them all as specimens of a species i didn't belong to. that I would never belong to.”
― Chris Bergeron, Valide

“because helping and holding and listening and caring were the only times we felt we knew what we were doing, even though we had no idea. because that was the way that other people loved us. because maybe, we thought in our secret hearts, that's all we were good for.

caregiver, i see you.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“to them, you are a mirror. they look at you to discover themselves. they will never see you because that's not what they came to find.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“You will be able to stop hurting people when you stop hurting yourself.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

“it's time to be curious about what lives in the ocean of you beyond the island of other people's needs. caregiver, are you curious? what if i told you: you don't need to heal others to heal yourself. you can just heal yourself. you do not need to give love to others to love yourself. you can just love yourself. within healer and helper, there is warrior, there is priestess, there is holy whore. who knows all the things you could be?”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“i wanted to be saved, but i'm not that kind of girl. there's something sharp inside me that even the son of God can't smooth out. and it hurts, because I once wanted so much to be the kind of girl who was worthy of salvation, who could just let herself be saved.”
― Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls

“...I was a Christian, a model student, a Good Girl. I couldn't be a monster. But something in me was disgusting, and I begged God to take it from me.”
― Joe Vallese, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror