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Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
“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
“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
“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
“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
“What would it mean to do enough, I wondered, as I had wondered before about that obligation to others that sometimes seems so clear and sometimes disappears altogether, so that now we owe nothing, anything we give is too much, and now our debt is beyond all counting.”
― 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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