Gavin Splatterbang > Gavin's Quotes

“Morning breaks. So do bottles and bones.”
― Clint Catalyst, Cottonmouth Kisses

“...my body has become
another country
and I feel like an unemployed
illegal alien
how will I survive
where I do not belong
I belong with you”
― Patrick Califia-Rice

“I wake up and I see the face of the devil and I ask him, "What time is it?"

And he says,
How much time do you want?”
― Diamanda Galas, The Shit of God

“and give me insults, give me
economic discrimination, give me
the darkened parking lot of a
windowless queer bar, give me
fleets of bigots and books banned
in libraries across america, feed the world
with lies about my life and plop a second
helping of oppression on my plate
and thank you for not making me straight.”
― Michelle Tea

“YOU YOU YOU

your eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook
crackling and yellow, curling at the edges
a book of myths
in which i do not appear.”
― Clint Catalyst, Caresses Soft as Sandpaper

“The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.”
― Poppy Z. Brite

“If we eliminate the pressure to pass, what delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation might we create?”
― Matt Bernstein Sycamore, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

“Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom. ”
― Pat Califia

“Insisting on maintaining dignity at all costs is paralyzing. Mistakes are informative, and so is playing the fool”
― Pat Califia, Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex

“and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical sense
and are not easy to fool with laughter”
― Charles Bukowski

“You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Wormwood

“Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”
― Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“The boys at the baths loved me. Of course, they were all drunk and high and would've loved a French poodle barking out "Jingle Bells"!”
― Holly Woodlawn, A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”
― bell hooks

“When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”
― Bayard Rustin

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“There's more to life than books, you know. But not much more.”
― Morrissey

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“I'm tired of resisting love. Love will never be safe, but we've seen the alternative.”
― Thea Hillman, Intersex

“Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown.

— Thea Hillman, "Dear Kath After"

from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache”
― Clint Catalyst, Michelle Tea, Thea Hillman, Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person

“He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“never say amen in church if they're
capping off a prayer about you.”
― Exene Cervenka, Adulterers Anonymous

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
― Dorothy Parker

“When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there’s your proof.”
― Dennis Cooper

“I feel that if I kept it secret it might grow in my mind (as poisonous things grow in the dark) and take its place with the other terrible thoughts that gnaw me”
― Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― George Eliot

“There's a fine line between funny and annoying – and it's exactly the width of a quotation mark.”
― Martha Brockenbrough

“I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

“The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat