“Lets be very clear about this, asshole: Ive been a woman in Arkansas. I know damn well what it means when a man says to me 'Calm down.' Being raped comes next, and thats a fact Im never going to fo...”

“Were not broken. Were not in the wrong bodies. Were not inadequate. Were not lesser. Were not unwanted. Were not fraudulent. Were not undesirable. Thats all just a set of lies we tell to soothe the...”

“I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.”

“Were all just people making decisions and accepting consequences as we march toward an impending and inevitable death.”

“Relinquishing control to another person is like death: its only scary until it finally happens.”

“Its the process of being minimized, invalidated, silenced. Its the process of being subjected to whatever someone else thinks I owe them. Its the process of being used, examined, explored, and thro...”

“I think the highest forgiveness is to accept that creation is thoroughly tangled, with every possible quality given outlet for expression. People need to accept once and for all that there is only ...”

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”

“Letting go doesn't mean that you don't care about someone anymore. It's just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.”

“Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their ass off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD'd...”

“You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly. Ci vedremo lassu, angelo.”

“The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indi...”

“He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.”

“Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.”

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.''In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All ...”