Bohdi

“Did I want to be like him? Did I want to be him? Or did I just want to have him? Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M.C. Escher.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I know it is my father's first time on this Earth, too. And I know He had it worse when he was little. But I was little too”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous