Ora Wittkop

“I’m not sure how big ten centimeters is, but Emily’s passageway into life was definitely not large enough to suit me. In fact, everything had been pushing on me for hours. I felt like toothpaste emerging from a tube. Painfully and slowly, like an inch per hour.”
― Jack Getze, Making Hearts

“Are you asleep?” I said I was. She lit a cigarette for me, one for herself. “Don’t you ever think you’d like to go back to detecting once in a while just for the fun of it?”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“But it is a maxim of mine that men (being superior creatures) are bound to improve women—if they can.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

“There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and cooly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a second that might have seemed accidental but was, I recognized, a bitter symptom of my perversion. Bursting with typical fourteen-year-old desire, I attempted to focus it in succession on the thought of every boy I knew, hoping to find some outlet for my horniness, even if it had to be perverted, secret, and doomed to disappointment. Without exception these attempts failed to produce anything but bemusement, if not actual disgust.
This crisis of self-esteem had been abruptly dispelled by the advent of Julie Lefkowitz, followed swiftly by her sister Robin, and then Sharon Horne and little Rose Fagan and Jennifer Schaeffer; but I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. Once in a while I would meet an enthralling man who shook, dimly but perceptibley, the foundations laid by Julie Lefkowitz, and I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual.”
― Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh