33 Quotes by Joshua Gaylord

Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.

There were so many beautiful, dark, and lonely ways in the sunken corridors of adolescence – how did everyone else manage to make it through without a map? Were they not tempted, as I was, to linger?

I knew the schedule. I liked to know in advance where people would be and where they wouldn’t be.

Lumen. There was Lumen, and there was the places people did not go. And Lumen would go to those places. She would leap over denies and crawl through mud. She would climb up on rooftops and call crazy with every little branch of her lungs.

We are always told that honesty and truth are the shining ideals. But sometimes the truth could be used as a punishment.

Girls, boys, it made no difference. you were skin and they were skin, and you buried yourself in the skin of others as they buried themselves in yours. Some of them cried and some of them howled – and whether the crying and howling was pain or pleasure, you couldn’t tell, and maybe they couldn’t either. Such are the ambiguities of primal youth.

I smeared honey on my chest, believing it might help me grown breasts. Honeybees are industrious – they can build anything.

I could draw maps of your skin – all of you. I have often, without your knowing it, traveled the topographies of your flesh. You were brilliant in the moonlight, and I remember you all.

The way he was looking at me made me wonder if he was talking about something other than god. Or if maybe god and the way he looked at me with those voracious boy-eyes were related. I wanted more of it. His boy-eyes, his godliness, which I felt deep down, like a surge.