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Michael Nava
144 quotes
“[Henry Rios, with Aaron Gold] "Every choice closes doors," I said, "and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they're surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p.18 [page numbers are from the 4th Edition, 2003]
“[Henry, with Katherine Paris] She looked away from me. A moment later she said, "I have never understood homosexuality. I can't picture what you men do with each other." "I could tell you but it would completely miss the point.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Grant Hancock, with Henry Rios] "As for me, when I die I'll direct my family to bury me without fanfare." I smiled. "When you die, Grant, the tailors and barbers will declare a day of national mourning.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry, with Katherine Paris] I smiled as charmingly as I knew how. Her hard, intelligent face showed no sign of being charmed.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Larry Ross] "There are only two stages to dying, Henry. Being alive and being dead.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His eyes were judging me. It was as if I was the last of a long line of grown-ups who would fail him.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these people were full of.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Josh and Henry] "Do you want to?" he whispered. I raised myself on my elbow and said, "Of course I do, but I haven't carried rubbers with me since I was sixteen." "Just this once," he said. "You could pull out before - you know." I squeezed his neck between my fingers. "No," I said softly. "There's AIDS, Josh. It's not worth the risk.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Irene Gentry] "We all love according to our natures.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Irene Gentry] "Some people are just so beautiful that life seems to speak to us through them - they're vital, radiant. It's more startling in men than women, I think, because we don't usually let ourselves think of men that way. But Shakespeare knew. Remember the sonnets? 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,' was written to another man.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Larry was in his study, going through a pile of papers. Watching him, it occurred to me that I hardly knew him at all. It was as if all these years I'd been seeing him in profile and now that he turned his face to me, it was the face of a stranger.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios, with Elena] The heat had become a bit denser and the light a little dustier as the fragrant morning waned. Birds called from the surrounding trees and the low burble of water sounded from the stream that ran through Elena's property. "This is heaven," I said, opening the car door. She smiled, deepening the lines around her mouth. "Have you ever read Primo Levi?" "No." "He has a passage in his book about concentration camp survivors―to the effect that those who have once been tortured go on being tortured. Heaven's not possible for people like that.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lips pursed, Sara moved swiftly and rudely through the crowd of midday shoppers as we crossed the square. Sara'd been thin as a girl, but no more. Not quite fat, but the extra weight she carried blurred her features. Pouches of flesh had gathered beneath her eyes and her chin. Damp circles stained her armpits and the seat of her dress was deeply wrinkled. Her makeup was hit-and-miss and she had the look of someone who no longer cared much about her appearance.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios, to Paul Windsor] "Society is a conspiracy and everyone who's different is its target.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios] "I acquired my values through trial and error." What I'd meant when I told Paul my values were acquired through trial and error was that they were learned, not given, and came out of my own experience.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After talking to Mark, I'd spent much of the night in the kind of "what if" ruminations that served no particular purpose except to depress me.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios] It has never taken much for me to dislike a cop. My automatic assumption that most of them are assholes is seldom disappointed.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Paul Windsor, with Henry Rios] Holding up a red M&M, he added, "I thought they'd stopped making these." "Someone started a letter-writing campaign and got the candy company to start making them again." I opened a 7-Up and took a swig. It was as warm and thick as the air in the room. "It's funny what people get themselves worked up about.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios, with Josh] "I think someone's at the door." "I'll see who it is." "If it's the grim reaper, tell him he's a couple of years early.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I didn't know what else to say. Moments like this brought home to me that no matter how well I thought I knew him, how much I loved him, we were on different sides of the fence that separated the infected from the uninfected. I could see a little way over to his side, but he lived there.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry] I shrugged. "Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios, with Kevin Reilly] "Sometimes I can't believe what people do to each other." "Believe it," he said. "There's nothing that hasn't been done by someone to someone. People settling scores is what keeps us in business.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A child's sexual innocence isn't moral, it's literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was a great and impartial hater; anyone different from him became an object of his contempt.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Gus Peña] "It's time for me to take care of me.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Chuck Sweeny] "Times change, we change with 'em.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was not quiet in my head.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios, with Raymond Reynolds, therapist] "Somewhere along the line, I had died." "What does that mean, Henry?" he inquired in his mild voice. "The thing that makes us human, the recognition of being alive, I had lost that. I drowned it in bourbon and kept myself so busy with work that I hadn't even noticed until that moment.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry, to the therapist] "You people always end up wanting to talk about mommy and daddy," I said, intending a joke, but it was more hostile than funny.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Josh] "Just listen to me. I don't want to die, Henry. I want to be like everyone else. I want my seventy-five years or whatever, but I know I'm not going to have them and it makes me crazy." He tipped his head back and swallowed hard. "I can't help resenting you. You're going to be alive after I'm dead and you'll find someone else." He drew a deep breath. "It's not fair. I had to get away from you. I had to get away from my own resentment.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church was just another totalitarian political entity, like the Communist Party or IBM, but I had to admit, it put on a good show. I watched the theatrics unfold.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having had to work twice as hard for what he deserved on merit alone, he'd developed a kind of rage, like an extra set of muscles, propelling him through life. The rage never went away. There was never enough to reward you for what you had suffered. And you never, ever, forgot you were an outsider, no matter how expensive your suits.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He hoisted himself up to the ledge of the pool, the water running streams down his thin, hard body. "I came out here from Tennessee to go to school, a long time ago. I was eighteen and pretty and there wasn't anything I wouldn't do in bed. I had a lot of friends." He pushed wet hair from his forehead. "Thing is, you don't stay young and pretty forever. It began to take more and more booze to keep up the illusion, not that anybody but me was fooled. The friends drifted off, the party moved on, and I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one, broke and a drunk.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Edith] "If you tell a child he's bad long enough and often enough, he will act it out.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Downstairs, in the bleak cafeteria, a crazy woman sat at a table carrying on an animated conversation with someone who wasn't there. The crazy woman got up and shook hands with the air.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Detective McBeth] "Being out of the closet is a luxury that many gay people can't afford. Maybe you can't understand that, but it's something I think about.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios] I said a prayer, always the same prayer. Two words. Help us.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Zack Bowen] "Damn, it's tough being a fag. People hate you who don't even know you, and the ones who know you, they're worse.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Josh Mandel] "Most things people care about are silly. They don't think about the ones that matter.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry Rios] "We never know anyone as well as we think we do.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Alex] "I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p.41 (Chapter 4) [page numbers as per the Alyson Publications Paperback Edition, April 2004]
“[Inez] "...If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source