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“Coincidence isn’t a luxury, it’s the flip side of fate… Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.”

“The greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence.”

“In that silence that would follow, you think, you’ll need to do something like put on a record or practice a gesture, but maybe you won’t do anything, because the other man will keep looking at you with his empty eyes whose depths you plumb, scuba diver, for any minimal indication of some hidden treasure that might rise to the surface - a smile on your lips and your hands full of precious stones.”

“He taught me that some stories are small affairs in themselves. We spin them like a little cotton candy, a wispy sweet that both begins and dissolved in our mouths.
Their love might work, and it might not, but they’re so beautiful as I imagine them. Neither of them say anything. Bob rests his head on his boy’s ass, white as the moon, and just for a moment, all the stories in Bob’s sky are put to shame.”

“Yeah, that’s how I feel — smiling. I never say no to anybody — Susan told me in the bar last week that was a fault. Directionless. I tried to tell her that I just never care and once in a while I do and then I change places and start saying yes to everything over there. That’s all it’s like.”

Loneliness, I began to realize, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost… I wanted to understand what it means to be lonely, and how it functioned in peoples lives, to attempt to chart the complex relationship between loneliness and art.

What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged? And is technology helping these things? Does it draw us closer, or trap us behind screens?

“Can you think of a time when you felt only one thing at one time? I think crying allows us to midwife our more intense, more complicated emotions. Get them outside of our bodies. And then, our body feels light and free again… Maybe you need a surrogate crier.”

“The world I had defended - and into which I had intertwined myself - did not love me… Still, they had something I wanted; they had stolen my God from me. That idea of God, of a world that, if touched rightly, might ‘give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him’, was something I couldn’t let go of. I would steal my God back. I would run with him through the burning streets.”

“The day I found out Jack had died, a part of my life that had been suspended in my subconscious suddenly locked into place. His death began to seem part of a lineage: men I knew and walked beside, collapsing under the pressured atmosphere of the world. That day, I felt as if we were all walking headlong into some winnowing fire, and the further we walked, the less of ourselves we seemed able to carry with us.”

“After a while, he started to whistle the song instead, and the birds were singing, too - a different tune, but no less steeped in a happiness brought on by the sunshine and the moving of the year. And I sat and listened, my head on his shoulder, and whatever it was the birds knew, my heart also sang.”