Henry Barreras

“You're not my sweetheart, you're myself. My heart or my sex. A branch of me.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Jimmy Schuyler was my new job. Slowly I moved his possessions to the Chelsea from an 8th Avenue flophouse where on the final day among the dry cleaned clothes still in plastic bags, charred bits of poetry on papers, art print books-- I masturbated because it was a filthy and interesting place and he found out because I told one person who told someone else. It's alright dear I don't need anything. Go have fun.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“Quite solemnly I told myself: "even though I'm still undecided at present and appear to be an idle pleasure-seeker par excellence, this is no reason to doubt that perhaps soon a time will come when I'll be firm resolution itself and ready to take on the full harshness, the utter nakedness, of life just as bravely as the next fellow."
I was not a little proud of this monologue.”
― Robert Walser, Masquerade and Other Stories

“My case is not unique : I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in this world. I haven’t worked, I haven’t studied. I have wept, I have cried out in protest. These tears and cries have taken up a great deal of my time. I am tortured by all the time lost whenever I think about it. I cannot think about things for long, but I can find pleasure in a withered lettuce leaf offering me nothing but regrets to chew over. There is no sustenance in the past. I shall depart as I arrived. Intact, loaded down with the defects that have tormented me. I wish I had been born a statue : I am a slug under my dunghill. Virtues, good qualities, courage, meditation, culture. With arms crossed on my breast I have broken myself against those words.”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde