There’s a hundred ways to love someone. All that matters is that you stay here in the same room.
— The womyn in Cash’s dream, Pigs in Heaven, p. 155
There is a risk, when experiencing difference, that the suspension of judgment will temporarily allow you to identify with an/other. But this is a danger of precisely the kind we should ask for from one another: the danger that I will recognize you as too human to desire to hurt you.
— my undergraduate thesis, p. 27
I grew up with all these hippies. Ten of them and one of me. None of them wanted to work and spent all their time talking and dreaming and fooling around. 90% of that hippie stuff is just bullshit but the ideals of that generation were very beautiful and powerful and rebellious. I had to dress and feed myself from the time I was six, which meant I became a very organised person. But there came a point when I was about seven or eight, when I saw the absurdity of living in a commune and I said to them, ‘Why don’t you just DO SOMETHING!?’
It is the conviction to live your life as you need to – and the remarkable grace under fire – demonstrated by trans people that inspires those of us who are not trans. Every single day passes where someone, somewhere, notices that they are living their own life of quiet desperation, or are otherwise living quietly and without rocking anyone’s boat, in ways that feel wrong. But when that person – or any person – meets a trans person who lives truthfully and with love and humor and loss, it is hard for them to ignore the unbelievable beauty & fortitude you all emanate.
This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard.
— Infinite Jest, p. 590
