Paul Monette Quotes

#1. The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free.

Paul Monette

#2. When you finally come out, there's a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.

Paul Monette

#3. So I told myself I would give it up, even prayed at night for it to be taken away, not knowing that 'it' was love.

Paul Monette

#4. Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.

Paul Monette

#5. The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.

Paul Monette

#6. And the Nazis. A real piece of work, old number XII, who wouldn't intervene even so far as to tell his Polish cardinals to dampen the enthusiasm of the good Catholics running the camps and the

Paul Monette

#7. The struggle for true openness and intimacy is a lifelong struggle for all of us, gay and straight alike. And besides, a difficult life brings you to the core of yourself, where you learn what justice is and how it has to be fought for.

Paul Monette

#8. The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become.

Paul Monette

#9. Perhaps we were atheists by default, but the matter of God did not come into the equation of our love.

Paul Monette

#10. A curious paradox here: hand in hand with the political rebellion of the age went a certain omnisexual freedom, but that meant you could sleep with anyone, not that you could be gay.

Paul Monette

#11. Change me, I whispered, change me.

Paul Monette

#12. To experience love as claustrophobia. In such a twisted paradigm lies the sick legacy of a lifetime in the closet.

Paul Monette

#13. As an artist, you reach for the pen that's full of blood.

Paul Monette

#14. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.

Paul Monette

#15. Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.

Paul Monette

#16. Being different was about something more than just our dicks.

Paul Monette

#17. If the government was going to continue to act as if we didn't exist, if the medical establishment was prone to gridlock over funds, if the drug companies were waiting till the curve got high enough for profit, then we would find our own way.

Paul Monette

#18. Lust and the English make no sense to me.

Paul Monette

#19. The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it.

Paul Monette

#20. How do you think poetry helps people? he'd ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.

Paul Monette

#21. I was out of the war because men like this were too scared to talk about dick.

Paul Monette

#22. Love and fuck in the same breath, even if it's your last.

Paul Monette

#23. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.

Paul Monette

#24. Poetry served as a sort of intellectual wallpaper to brighten up the closet.

Paul Monette

#25. And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they're doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there's no denying they've grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide,

Paul Monette

#26. And thus I wonder about so many gay men I've met since, pillars of the community, out to everyone else but Mom, who still refer to their lovers as something between a roommate and a valet. Just who is being protected here, and who thinks queer is wrong?

Paul Monette

#27. Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.

Paul Monette

#28. That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse.

Paul Monette

#29. And just getting into bed with somebody wasn't the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique - depersonalizing so completely the body embraced that they felt nothing at all.

Paul Monette

#30. Apparently long hair was enough to make you a faggot in Chicago in '68.

Paul Monette

#31. Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back.

Paul Monette

#32. Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security.

Paul Monette

#33. It was the first time I'd ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet.

Paul Monette

#34. What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you've kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.

Paul Monette

#35. It would take me the better part of growing up to understand that intimacy, more than sex or even sexual orientation, was the universal battleground, and no easier for straight than gay.

Paul Monette

#36. That would be my theme, I thought: once I came out, the world was all windows.

Paul Monette

#37. When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last - and wouldn't end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all.

Paul Monette

#38. I suppose we'd been waiting for each other all our lives.

Paul Monette

#39. They looked at me, in my hippie garb, with horror and disgust, the Decline of Western Civilisation suddenly plopped in their midst.

Paul Monette

#40. In this Puritan sinkhole of a culture, we don't teach children the uses of pleasure, and so they decide we are fools and go their own way, blindly. If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks.

Paul Monette

#41. I liked being adrift in symbols, beauty for beauty's sake.

Paul Monette