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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
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“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 realized that my pleasure wasn't lessened by his absence, that what was surely a betrayal (we had our contract, though it had never been signed, never set in words at all) had only refined our encounter, allowing him to become more vividly present to me even as I was left alone on my stained knees, and allowing me, with all the freedom of fantasy, to make of him what I would.”
― What Belongs to You
― What Belongs to You
“He caught me and held my gaze without welcome or warmth or any hint of what we had shared, and my sense of having violated something, of having looked where I shouldn't have faded, as I understood that this was what he wanted me to see all along, that I was there not as guard but as audience. I was there to see how different from me he was, how free of the foulness my father had shown him; and now that I had seen it, I knew our friendship had run its course.”
― 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
“That's all care is, I thought, it's just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it's hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can't look at many at once, and it's so easy to look away.”
― What Belongs to You
― What Belongs to You
Romania
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Grupul Romania, deschis tuturor celor de nationalitate romana, rudelor si prietenilor acestora, indiferent de unde sunt, locuiesc, traiesc prin lume. ...more
Torino Book Club
— 271 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
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