Kaleb

“And me now. Look at me. See me there with them, in the snow—both inside and outside their understanding. See how I made them uneasy. They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent. They believed I would know a world larger than their own. They hated me for my good grades, for my white ways. All at once they were disgusted, and jealous, and deeply protective, and deeply proud. Look at us, our last night together, when we were brothers still.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals

“I can, from the distance of years now, still think I’m hearing the voices of two young men singing these words in Neapolitan toward daybreak, neither realizing, as they held each other and kissed again and again on the dark lanes of old Rome, that this was the last night they would ever make love again.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“That is a rare gift, Alexyin, for another person to see every ugliness in you and still be able to find that part of you that they can love, that can love them back.”
― Kirby Crow, The King of Forever

“The boys are sweeping off the truck,” she tells the father. He nods. Hear the way she says it, the boys, how quickly and fully the son in the tub is excluded from that designation; how badly the boy wishes to be out there with his brothers, doing as he is told. The mother sits down on the toilet and watches the father bathe their son. She holds the clothes on her lap. The son will not speak to her. She watches him, and she wants to tell him that he can put all his hate on her; she will take it all, if that’s what he needs her to do. Listen, really listen, and that’s what she is saying in her silence. The boy can’t help but hear.”
― Justin Torres, We the Animals