6 Quotes by Amy Ellis Nutt

Lesson number one: “Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with,” he told Spack. “Gender identity is who you go to bed as.

We live in liminal time, each moment sliding into the next, the future into the present, the present into the past. We believe all things are possible, and that there are always more stories to be written.

Who we are is inseparable not only from who we think we are, but from who others think we are. We are touched and loved, we are appreciated or dismissed, praised or scorned, comforted or wounded. But before all else, we are seen. We are identified by others through the contours and colors and movements of our bodies.

What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown. – Marcel Proust, Time Regained.

Who we are is inseparable not only from who we think we are, but from who others think we are.

Before love, before loss, before we ever yearn to be something we are not, we are bodies breathing in space – -“turbulent, fleshy, sensual,” Walt Whitman once wrote. We are inescapably physical, drawn to the inescapably human. But if we are defined by our own bodies, we are entwined by the bodies of others.