Joshua Gaylord Quotes

Promises are easy to make. [...] They speak of a defined future to which you are required to adhere. They commit you beyond the length of your experience.

What they do is take away possibility.

Promises are the opposite of hope.

Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.

There were so many beautiful, dark, and lonely ways in the sunken corridors of adolescence - how did everyone else manage to make it through without a map? Were they not tempted, as I was, to linger?

The snow came after two o' clock. It fell faintly in the cones of lamplight, descending like fleets or fairies through the cold sky. I was awake - the only one in town, I was sure - and I was sure those miniature fallen sylphs were for me and my personal delectation. They came for me, because nature likes a saint. They settled on my window sill, they collected on the dark grass of my lawn, they danced and whirled in the wind gusts before my eyes. I put my hand to the windowpane to greet it, the first snow. By the time I woke in the morning, I saw that after the snow had come to me, it had visited everyone.

Rather than simply being subject to them, I had wanted to know what it felt like to be one of the forces in this world.

A big bubble. A block wide. It goes where you go - you're the center of it. And every object gets a little bit better while it's in that bubble with you. It's always very bright where you are.

I knew the schedule. I liked to know in advance where people would be and where they wouldn't be.

What I do, it's personal. I take responsibility for it. It's me. It ain't some hormones or rite of passage or mass hysteria. I don't fucking cry about it in the morning.

The way he was looking at me made me wonder if he was talking about something other than god. Or if maybe god and the way he looked at me with those voracious boy-eyes were related. I wanted more of it. His boy-eyes, his godliness, which I felt deep down, like a surge.

Lumen. There was Lumen, and there was the places people did not go. And Lumen would go to those places. She would leap over denies and crawl through mud. She would climb up on rooftops and call crazy with every little branch of her lungs.

We live our lives by measures of weeks, months, years, but the creatures we truly are, those are exposed in fractions of moments.

Goddamn it," he said, seething. "Goddamn you! No fear. Not an ounce of fucking fear. You invite - you invite - destruction. What's the world to you, huh? A place to die in? You aren't even a girl - you're a… you're a tragedy. There isn't a monster in the world - not a monster in the world till he meets an eager victim.

And so masters and slaves are nothing but the turn of a card.

I saw you come out with him. He hurt you." "Everybody hurts everybody."
"No."
He said no, but I wondered how could he not see that.

It was impossible to tell how she felt. When she tried to look inside of herself, all she saw were tangled things shifting in and out of focus.

Her smile was something I couldn't describe, except to say that it seemed to be queenly in the way that queens remind you of situations grander than your own puny life could conceive.

the worst kind of devil is the kind that believes itself to be holy

It would be different now, I thought. His colleagues, they would not know what to say to me now that I had grown into a young woman. People fear those curious interstitial creatures who are neither children nor adults.

They could hurt you," I insisted.
"Not on purpose. They're just teenagers. We'll be like that too one day.

Sometimes you hide away a memory because it is so precious that you don't want to dilute it with the attempt to recount it.

Some parents in our neighborhood do everything they can to keep their children away from violent images. And then, when something terrible happens, like murder or rape or genocide - well, then a conversation has to be had with these young innocents to explain that, yes, goodness is sometimes a fiction, like Santa Claus, and that humanity is, underneath all the cookie baking and song singing, a shameful and secret nastiness. Me, I'm going to raise my son differently. What he will be made to know is that there is violence in everything - even in goodness, if you're passionate about it.

You cannot always understand boys, the things they do. They act, sometimes, as though in thrall to severe but natural forces. They can be waterfalls or wind gusts.

You have to put Lumen in the lake and see how still she stands, skimming the surface with her pale palms, embarrassed at the flatness of her own chest, noiseless and inert amid the raucous clamor of other boys and girls.

I could draw maps of your skin - all of you. I have often, without your knowing it, traveled the topographies of your flesh. You were brilliant in the moonlight, and I remember you all.