375 books
—
516 voters
Fear has more disguises than my mother has floral dresses, and that’s saying something as she’s got a wardrobe full – though now she often wears the same one, the one with the cacti, as though it’ll keep everyone away from her, even though
...more
“But I'm your son, which was my only appeal and the last thing I would say. He made a dismissive sound, almost a laugh, and then he spoke again, with a snarling voice I had never heard before, he said The hell you are. He went on, he spoke without stopping, A faggot, he said, if I had known you would never have been born. You disgust me, he said, do you know that, you disgust me, how could you be my son? As I listened to him say these things it was as though even as I laid claim to myself I found there was nothing to claim, nothing or next to nothing, as though I were dissolving and my tears were the outward sign of that dissolution.”
― What Belongs to You
― What Belongs to You
“I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived.”
― What Belongs to You
― What Belongs to You
“I grew up at the height of the AIDS panic, when desire and disease seemed essentially bound together, the relationship between them not something that could be managed but absolute and unchangeable, a consequence and its cause. Disease was the only story anyone ever told about men like me where I was from, and it flattened my life to a morality tale, in which I could be either chaste or condemned. Maybe that's why, when I finally did have sex, it wasn't so much pleasure I sought as the exhilaration of setting aside restraint, of pretending not to be afraid, a thrill of release so intense it was almost suicidal.”
― What Belongs to You
― What Belongs to You
“There was something in his manner of seduction, no show of desire at all; what he offered was a transaction, and again he showed no disappointment when reflexively and without hesitation I said no to him. It was the answer I had always given to such proposals (which are inevitable in the places I frequent), not out of any moral conviction but out of pride, a pride that had weakened in recent years, as I realized I was being shifted by the passage of time from one category of erotic object to another.”
― What Belongs to You
― What Belongs to You
“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”
― Perestroika
― Perestroika
Romania
— 4890 members
— last activity Mar 24, 2026 03:05AM
Grupul Romania, deschis tuturor celor de nationalitate romana, rudelor si prietenilor acestora, indiferent de unde sunt, locuiesc, traiesc prin lume. ...more
Torino Book Club
— 264 members
— last activity Oct 08, 2025 10:08AM
Gruppo che nasce con l'intento di far incontrare noi lettori di Torino, discutere dei libri che più ci hanno appassionati e scambiarne altrettanti se ...more
Robert’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Robert’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Robert
Lists liked by Robert












































