33 Quotes by Joshua Gaylord

It is always a young girl’s dream to have a boy believe in her most colorful fantasies. You paint landscapes with your humble heart, then you seek to populate them with boys who will understand.

We live our lives by measures of weeks, months, years, but the creatures we truly are, those are exposed in fractions of moments.

They don’t hurt anybody. Except maybe themselves. And each other.

Her smile was something I couldn’t describe, except to say that it seemed to be queenly in the way that queens remind you of situations grander than your own puny life could conceive.

On certain days in the spring, in late April, say, it is possible to believe what the animals believe -that horror and beauty are hearty allies, and that when you live in the full roiling of your guts it’s impossible to make distinctions between them.

You have to put Lumen in the lake and see how still she stands, skimming the surface with her pale palms, embarrassed at the flatness of her own chest, noiseless and inert amid the raucous clamor of other boys and girls.

You cannot always understand boys, the things they do. They act, sometimes, as though in thrall to severe but natural forces. They can be waterfalls or wind gusts.

And so masters and slaves are nothing but the turn of a card.

I liked the rows of unpopulated seats staring at me, their lower halves all folded up except one on the aisle that was broken and remained always open, a poor busted tooth in that grinning mouth. There is nothing to fear in such cavernous and sepulchral spaces. You fill them with the riots of your imagination.