19 Quotes by Garrard Conley

Love, over time, could either blossom or wither, become a source of wonder or a remembered ache.

You cut out what was once dear to you, ignore the ache in the back of your throat, erase the details you want to forget.

With each passing day at the facility, it seemed as though becoming straight was simply a matter of good lighting, of ignoring what you didn’t want to see.

But love was always moving, always pushing us forward – always in action – and we often had no choice but to submit to where it lead us.

If I didn’t say too much, if people didn’t notice me, then I might also escape God’s roving Sauron eye.

What did it feel like to not have to think about your every move, to not be scrutinized for everything you did, to not have to lie every day?

There is a mystery in this, a minor apocalypse somewhere between what these two men once knew of themselves- a holding on to something that, in turn, refused to let them go- and I long to know it, like the old prophets.

Cutting away my roots and the people I loved would transform me into a shell of the person I once was, an automaton stripped of all its gears.

What my mother didn’t yet know about being gay in the South was that you never ran out of material, that being secretly gay your whole life, averting your eyes every time you saw a handsome man, praying on your knees every time a sexual thought entered your mind or every time you’d acted even remotely feminine – this gave you an embarrassment of sins for which you constantly felt the need to apologize, repent, beg forgiveness.