51 Quotes by Paul Monette

Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn’t hold me back.

Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.

If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. The erotic can be a window into the deepest core of feeling, but more and more doesn’t get you there.

I suppose we’d been waiting for each other all our lives.

And just getting into bed with somebody wasn’t the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique – depersonalizing so completely the body embraced that they felt nothing at all.

What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you’ve kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.