Justin Torres Quotes

#1. Shame doesn't exist in the animal kingdom. It's a human conception.

Justin Torres

#2. All that pent up longing," he says, "all that desire to flail and flap around. Them wings have needs.

Justin Torres

#3. I don't think that any family has a function. I just think that a family is. It just exists.

Justin Torres

#4. Animals don't think in terms of victims and villains, or good and bad, or evil, or shame.

Justin Torres

#5. Even later, I will come to doubt whether I ever really believed such a book would not be found
maybe my words were for all of them, that they might discover themselves, and discover me.

Justin Torres

#6. WE ALL THREE sat at the kitchen table in our raincoats, and Joel smashed tomatoes with a small rubber mallet. We had seen it on TV: a man with an untamed mustache and a mallet slaughtering vegetables, and people in clear plastic ponchos soaking up the mess, having the time of their lives.

Justin Torres

#7. The son will not speak to her. She watches him, and she wants to tell him that he can put all his hate on her; she will take it all, if that's what he needs her to do. Listen, really listen, and that's what she is saying in her silence. The boy can't help but hear.

Justin Torres

#8. God's scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me Joel, we're nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We're on our own.

Justin Torres

#9. As you become an adult, shame gets introduced and reintroduced constantly to you. So where something that, to a child, just is what it is - you know, your father's violent but he loves you and that's just the way it is - later on you realize that this is like different, shameful, blah blah blah.

Justin Torres

#10. Each was radiant, gorgeous. How they posed for me.

Justin Torres

#11. What happens when you die?" I asked. "Nothing happens." he said. "Nothing happens forever.

Justin Torres

#12. What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to Heaven.

Justin Torres

#13. When we were three together, we stuck our fingers into each other's eyes and pulled chairs out from underneath.

Justin Torres

#14. The magic of God is three. We were the magic of God.

Justin Torres

#15. Sometimes I would be very upset because my memories are very murky from my childhood, but there are certain emotional memories or emotional truths that are painful, and things that I know to be the case and I had to nail them down, and that was difficult.

Justin Torres

#16. I totally bristle against words like "dysfunction" or "abuse."

Justin Torres

#17. We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful - little animals, clawing at what we needed.

Justin Torres

#18. Do it to me.' 'What?' we asked. 'Make me born.

Justin Torres

#19. I'm an adult," the boy says. "I got rights."
"Everybody's got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don't got is power.

Justin Torres

#20. They weren't scared, or dispossessed, or fragile. They were possible.

Justin Torres