Casey McQuiston Quotes

Alex paces the solarium and listens to Henry talk, stories about a man with Henry's same sandy hair and strong, straight nose, someone Alex has met in shadows that pass through the way Henry speaks and moves and laughs.

I think perhaps Hamilton said it better in a letter to Eliza:

You engross my thoughts to intirely to allow me to think of anything else- you not only employ my mind all day; but you intrude upon my sleep. I meet you in every dream- and when I wake I cannot close my eyes again for ruminating on your sweetness.

Everything was put in a specific place for a reason. Everything has a meaning, an intention.

Like countless others, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. I am and I am bisexual. History will remember us

Hang on,' Alex says. 'Are we. Um. Are we asking the same thing?

Here,' Alex says, moving his own hips, 'watch me.'
With a grave gulp of champagne, Henry says, 'I am.

Sometimes you just jump and hope it's not a cliff.

Are you psychoanalyzing me?" Henry asks. "I don't think royal guests are allowed to do that.

I want you - "
"Then fucking have me."
" - but I don't want this."
Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room.
"What does that even mean?"
"I don't want it!" Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. "Don't you bloody see? I'm not like you. I can't afford to be reckless. I don't have a family who will support me. I don't go about shoving who I am in everyone's faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I'm allowed, all right, and it doesn't make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don't get to come here and call me a coward for it.

Alex snatches a shirt and boxers at random from the floor, shoves them at Henry's chest, and points him towards the closet. "Get in there."

"Quite," he observes.

"Yes, we can unpack the ironic symbolism later. GO.

Oh my God, I thought you were getting into international relations or something."
"I mean, technically - "
"If you finish that sentence, I'm gonna spend tonight in jail.

If Alex from this time last year could see this," Alex says, leaning into Henry's ear. "He'd say, 'Oh, I'm in love with Henry? That must be why I'm such a berk to him all the time,'" Henry suggests.

If there's any legacy for me on this earth, I want it to be true.

Come back to me when you're done being flung through the firmament, you lost Pleiad.

And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occured to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you.

And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it?

Christ, you are as thick as it gets,' he says, and he grabs Alex's face in both hands and kisses him.

The crowd pushes him back into Henry's chest, and after absolutely everything, all the emails and texts and months on the road and secret rendezvous and nights of wanting, the whole accidentally-falling-in-love-with-your-sworn-enemy-at-the-absolute-worst-possible-time thing, they made it. Alex said they would- he promised. Henry's smiling so wide and bright that Alex thinks his heart's going to break trying to hold the size of this entire moment, the completeness of it, a thousand years of history swelling inside his rib cage.

Take anything you want and know you deserve to have it.

Sometimes you have a fire under your ass for no good goddamn reason. You're gonna burn out like this.

If Alex's head is a storm, Henry is the place lightning hits ground.

Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it with, whom the American people will hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice.

Straight people, he thinks, probably don't spend this much time convincing themselves that they're straight.

Ellen sighs and looks over at Leo. "I did that, didn't I? No goddamn manners. Like a couple of little opossums. This is why they say women can't have it all.

The next slide is titled: 'Exploring your sexuality: Healthy, but does it have to be with the Prince of England?' She apologizes for not having time to come up with better titles. Alex actively wishes for the sweet release of death.

Henry steps forward, and Oscar looks him up and down- the Burberry bag, the cooler on his shoulder, the elegant smile, the extended hand. His dad had been confused but ultimately willing when to roll with it when Alex asked if he could bring a friend and casually mentioned the friend would be the Prince of Wales. He's not sure how this will go.

"Hello," Henry says. "Good to meet you. I'm Henry."

Oscar slaps his hand into Henry's. "Hope you're ready to fucking party.

FEDERAL FUNDING, TRAVEL EXPENSES, BOOTY CALLS, AND YIU.

He wants to set himself on fire, but he can't afford for anyone to see him burn.

She's certain he was the one who vandalized the sign outside of one particular senator's office to read BITCH MCCONNELL.

Do either of y'all know what a viscount is?" June is saying, halfway through a cucumber sandwich. "I've met, like, five of them, and I keep smiling politely as if I know what it means when they say it. Alex, you took comparative international governmental relational things. Whatever. What are they?"

"I think it's that thing when a vampire creates an army of crazed sex waifs and starts his own ruling body.

I thought, this is the most incredible thing I have ever seen, and I had better keep it a safe distance away from me. I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.

And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you.

And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it?

Sometimes, even now, I still can't.

Henry who's seen him in glasses and tolerates him at his most annoying and still kissed him like he wanted him, singularly, not the idea of him.

Wait," she says, reaching for his phone again, "are you watching videos of Justin Trudeau speaking French again?"
"That's not a thing I do!"
"That is a thing I have caught you doing at least twice since you met him at the state dinner last year, so yeah, it is," she says. Alex flips her off. "Wait, oh my God, is it fan fiction about yourself? And you didn't invite me? Who do they have you boning now? Did you read the one I sent you with Macron? I died."
"If you don't stop, I'm gonna call Taylor Swift and tell her you changed your mind and want to go to her Fourth of July party after all.

You are the thistle in the tender and sensitive arse-crack of my life.

Alex rolls his eyes. 'For fuck's sake, man, you just had my dick in your mouth, you can kiss me good-night.

Er," Henry says, adding to the list of vowel sounds he has to show for himself. It is, unfortunately, also sexy. After all these weeks, the bar is low.

He tells his too-fast brain: Don't miss it this time. He's too important.

Christ," Henry says, slapping at a bug that's landed on him, "what are these infernal creatures?"

"Mosquitoes," Alex supplies.

"They're awful," Henry says loftily. "I'm going to catch an exotic plague."

"I'm... sorry?"

"I just mean to say, you know, Philip is the heir and I'm the spare, and if that nervy bastard has a heart attack at thirty five and I've got malaria, whither the spare?

You are", he says, "the absolute worst idea I've ever had.

You've been, like, Draco Malfoy–level obsessed with Henry for years.

Or his senior year, when he got drunk and made out with Liam in his twin bed for an hour, and he didn't have a sexual crisis about it - that had to mean he was straight, right? Because if he were into guys, it would have felt scary to be with one, but it wasn't.

I've always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose.

Please stay gorgeous and strong and unbelievable.

What are we even defending here, Philip? What kind of legacy? What kind of family, that says, we'll take the murder, we'll take the raping and pillaging and the colonizing, we'll scrub it up nice and neat in a museum, but oh no, you're a bloody poof? That's beyond our sense of decorum! I've bloody well had it. I've sat about long enough letting you and Gran and the weight of the damned world keep me pinned, and I'm finished. I don't care. You can take your legacy and your decorum and you can shove it up your fucking arse, Philip. I'm done.

Until he met the most devastatingly gorgeous peasant boy from a nearby village who said absolutely ghastly things to him that made him feel alive for the first time in years and who turned out to be the most mad sort of sorcerer, one who could conjure up things like gold and vodka shots and apricot tarts out of absolutely nothing, and the prince's whole life went up in a puff of dazzling purple smoke, and the kingdom said, "I can't believe we're all so surprised.

You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.

He didn't realize how terrified he was of her knowing until the fear is gone.

He's absolutely sure that guys who kissed the Prince of England and liked it don't get elected to represent Texas.

He's not, he thinks, upset people know. He's always been pretty unapologetic when it came to things like who he dates and what he's into, although those were never anything like this. Still, the cocky shithead part of him is slightly pleased to finally have a claim on Henry. Yep, the prince? Most eligible bachelor in the world? British accent, face like a Greek god, legs for days? Mine.

And Alex's heart doesn't spread itself out in his chest, and he doesn't have to grip the edge of the settee to steady himself. Because that's what he would do if he were here in this palace to fall in love with Henry, and not just continuing this thing where they fly across the world to touch each other and don't talk about it. That's not why he's here. It's not.

You listen to me," she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It's the game face he's seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. "I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I'll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you're serious about this, I'll back your play."
Alex is silent.
But the debates, he thinks. But the general.
Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She'll handle it.
"So," she says. "Do you feel forever about him?"
And there's no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he's known all along.
"Yeah," he says, "I do."
Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid

Never before had there been a prince quite like him: born with his heart on the outside of his body.

I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.

On the map of you, my fingers could always find the green hills, Wales. Cool waters and a shore of white chalk. The ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct. Your spine's a ridge I'd die climbing.

If I could spread it out on my desk, I'd find the corner of your mouth where it pinches with my fingers, and I'd smooth it away and you'd be marked with the names of saints like all the old maps. I get the nomenclature now- saints' names belong to miracles

Don't act like this isn't all part of your extra-long game of abusing your position to murder Woody Allen and make it look like an accident," Alex says.
"He's just so frail, it'd only take one good push-

He wants to match the new freckles along Henry's nose to the stars above them and make him name the constellations.

Should I tell you that when we're apart, your body comes back to me in dreams? That when I sleep, I see you, the dip of your waist, the freckle above your hip, and when I wake up in the morning, it feels like I've just been with you, the phantom touch of your hand on the back of my neck fresh and not imagined? That I can feel your skin against mine, and it makes every bone in my body ache? That, for a few moments, I can hold my breath and be back there with you, in a dream, in a thousand rooms, nowhere at all?

An third, some saucy tart once tried to impugn my virtue against an oil painting of him, and in the halls of memory, some things demand context.

I don't suppose you'll be anywhere near Kensington anytime soon?'
'That shithole?' he says with a wink. 'Not if I can help it.

The phrase 'see attached bibliography' is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.

Your hair in the mornings is truly a wonder to behold.

So, you can hate the heir to the throne all you want, write mean poems about him in your diary, but the minute you see a camera, you act like the sun shines out of his dick, and you make it convincing.

I'm really going to have you offed," Henry tells him. "You'll never see it coming. Our assassins are trained in discretion. They will come in the night, and it will look like a humiliating accident."
"Autoerotic asphyxiation?"
"Toilet heart attack."
"Jesus."
"You've been warned."
"I thought you'd kill me in a more personal way. Silk pillow over my face, slow and gentle suffocation. Just you and me. Sensual."
"Ha. Well." Henry coughs.

Alex hasn't been a good Catholic in a long time, but he knows confession is a sacrament.

It's weird because I always know things about people, gut feelings that usually lead me in more or less the right direction. I do think I got a gut feeling with you, I just didn't have what I needed in my head to understand it. But I kind of kept chasing it anyway, like I was just going blindly in a certain direction and hoping for the best. I guess that makes you the North Star?

Oh, like, I thought we were already there with you being bi and everything. Sorry, are we not? Did I skip ahead again? My bad. Hello, would you like to come out to me? I'm listening.

and the six of them fall together in a tangle of hoarse laughter and expensive shoes

Love is like a fairy tale, it would come sweeping into your life on the back of a dragon one day.

You think y'all are off the hook for institutional bigotry because you come from a blue state. Not every white supremacist is a meth-head from Bumfuck Mississippi. There are plenty of them at Duke or UPenn on Daddy's money.

What?" Henry shouts over the noise when he sees the look on Alex's face.
"My life is a cosmic joke and you're not a real person," Alex says, wheezing.
"What?" Henry yells again.
"I said, you look great, baby!

You really are a complete idiot if you believe that," Henry hisses, the note balled in his fist. "When have I ever, since the first instant I touched you, pretended to be anything less than in love with you? Are you so fucking self-absorbed as to think this is about you and whether or not I love you, rather than the fact I'm an heir to the fucking throne? You at least have the option to not choose a public life eventually, but I will live and die in these palaces and in this family, so don't you dare come to me and question if I love you when it's the thing that could bloody well ruin everything.

When Henry's gone, Alex finds the stationery by the bed: Fromagerie Nicole Barthélémy. Leaving your clandestine hookup directions to a Parisian cheese shop. Alex has to admit: Henry really has a solid handle on his personal brand.

Hey, have I told you lately that you're brave? I still remember what you said to that little girl in the hospital about Luke Skywalker. 'He's proof that it doesn't matter where you come from or who your family is.' Sweetheart, you're proof too.

Sugar, I cannot express to you how much the press does not give a fuck about who started what," Ellen says. "As your mother, I can appreciate that maybe this isn't your fault, but as the president, all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.

I don't know what kind of sexual crisis you're having right now, like, four years after it would have been useful, but, well. I'm not saying what we did in high school makes you gay or bi or whatever, but I can tell you I'm gay, and that even though I acted like what we were doing wasn't gay back then, it super was." He sighs. "Does that help, Alex? My Bloody Mary is here, and I need it to talk about this phone call.

Just so we're clear, I'm about to have sex with you in this storage closet to spite your family. Like, that's what's happening?'
'Right.'
'Awesome, fuckin' love doing things out of spite.

Dear Thisbe,
I wish there weren't a wall.
Love, Pyramus

And the whole world watched, and history remembered.

Henry leans down to meet Alex's mouth, and Alex is. Well, Alex is so in love he could die.

Wait!" Alex yells up to the driver. "Stop! Stop the car!"

Up close, it's beautiful. Two stories tall. He can't imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast.

It's a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other.

He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet: Never tell me the odds.