David Keith

“You need only to have glimpsed it once to know there's a window out of all this black and sleepless night. Then you must use it to hope on. Key to the dream country where all your people are whole again, and the gunboats can't reach you, and the Empire of Hate is rubble. You and your secret dream of freedom are the tidal wave. Keep watch, every night if you have to. As for sleeping, you can sleep when you're dead.”
― Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

“Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.”
― Paul Monette

“In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir