A Minor.chorus Quotes

Death itself wasn't nearly as devastating as what the human drive to stay alive causes us to accumulate over time … the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.

What if I’m a beautiful wound people dance inside of?

Maybe early on I determined I didn't have to live … I just had to be alive.

write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property

Graduate school is hardly the place to end white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism.

Rather than change the world, a novel could index a longing for something else, for a different arrangement of bodies, feelings, and environments in which human flourishing wasn't inhibited for the marginalized, which seemed as urgent an act of rebellion as any.

What if I wrote something that sounded like dozens of people in protest?

How instead to make a novel into a bomb? How to plant a novel in the moral infrastructure of a corrupt nation? How to write sentences that go tick, tick, tick?

Could a place have a soul?

I write because I've read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I've loved and been loved. I want to find out what "we" or "us" I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.

I asked Micheal if he’d ever felt empty, like something was missing, to which he said emptiness wasn’t something to run from. We all begin with emptiness, he argued: an empty name, an empty house, an empty life. Mine is a life of beginnings, he said. Every morning I start over.

For all he knew, I was a small town he could get lost inside of; for all I knew, he was a cliff I could hurl myself from.

There was a lot I didn't know, but I knew that with total certainty.

The late summer sun was already quite low in the sky as I continued driving. It was red, like an apple. I was a red man. My longing was red. My heart was a ripe fruit.

They were boys who knew only how to fail at boyhood … It was like an ethnographic spectacle.

Something inside me dilated like a pupil at the sight of a shame-drenched man.

If anything would save two Cree boys from the throes of a world that wasn't built for them it would be love and little else.

He had to do alone one of the unavoidable demands our humanness makes of us: submit to the indeterminacy of our feelings, allow them to govern us, however terrifying it is to do so.

Write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property.

On November 15, 1977, Barthes wrote this in his Mourning Diary: “I am either lacerated or ill at ease / and occasionally subject to gusts of life.” My hypothesis on the morning of August 6 was this: a novel is a gust of life from another world. August 6, midnight. I tossed my body at a stranger as if he were a gust of life. August 7, dawn. Googled: reasons to live. Approximately nine billion results. Googled: how to write a novel. Eight hundred million results. That was almost a trillion arguments against death.

Love, he realized, can be oppressive simply because it illuminates everything one has turned their back on.

much of my adolescence was spent estimating how much or little of myself I would have to render invisible in order not to gravely expose my otherness.

We fucked again and then another time, both agreeing to make with our bodies a cathedral of distraction.

What seems to be resonant with everyone I interviewed is the belief that we have to tell our stories, that storytelling will redeem us somehow, make us less lonely.

A common enemy, in other words, is another name for social cohesion.

I was struck, though I didn’t mention it, by this “we,” a pronoun as vast and emotional as history. Lena, on account of having been on the rez her whole life, could marshal this collective voice. She was one of many in a chorus that sang of flourishing and grief.

The other day, he told me, it occurred to him that the anger he directed at his son was, in actuality, anger at himself, for failing to open up space for his son to experiment and make mistakes and challenge the adults around him.

When I was growing up, everyone around me was in a relationship. Some of the couples in my family had been together for decades. No one was single, and if they were, they were treated with circumspection. Loneliness was a curse, something to be avoided at all costs. I’ve always felt desperate to be in love, even as a closeted teenager, especially as a closeted teenager.

guarded each other’s peace and solitude when we did come together, which is Rilke’s trusted definition of love.

A fetish is a fetish because of its aura of unattainability. What if part of me refused love as much as I ached for it? What if I wanted to destroy myself as much as I wanted to be saved?

Remember when that professor told me that I was lucky to be able to write from lived experience, that that made me more valuable on the job market these days? I asked. He said it with such nonchalance and exactitude. I walked away. I didn’t want to cause a commotion, but I wish I would’ve said, Do you know what you’re saying to me? That my suffering is an economic privilege?

closeness with a queerer notion of motherhood. I was mothered by biological kin as well as by friends and lovers and strangers and myself. This was what I suppose the writer Maggie Nelson means by the “democratization of the maternal function,” a more egalitarian distribution of the labor of caretaking, less a gendered burden and more so a collective undertaking that is reciprocal. We are both caring and cared for.

Something I began thinking about in your class is that writing is fundamentally a social act. I write because I’ve read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I’ve loved and been loved. I want to find out what “we” or “us” I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.

All I'm good for is love, I think.

Some boys are as fleeting as the memory of rainwater during a wet spring. Many of us are relics of an impossible future, too drenched in the past to gesture to anything but loss. We are questions first and foremost, then children. Which means we are half-truths; we are where the boundary of the real intersects with that of the unreal. Children of an invisible war are essentially ghosts.

What this meant was that I was a gay man listening to a gay man who hadn't been listened to.

Suppose a body were trapped between two parentheses, I thought, made out to be an aside, a distraction, a trace of another narrative possibility. Would you set it free, set it loose on the world?

That felt as inevitable as literature.

A mother is a library seconds before the tornado hits.

Still, I loved my mother with the fortitude of a line break.

sometimes when I have sex it feels like I'm a photograph a man takes off the wall and puts back somewhere else and for the rest of the night I feel a little crooked Imao

My novel, then, would be a kind of literary ethnography of sadness and hope, of constraint and possibility.

I was interested in how a singular voice, when heard from a sociological distance, implicated a larger population, in how the autobiographical was rarely an individualistic mode; all of its wonder and devastation was social.

I was going to make something that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.

I was going to make something that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.

In a matter of days, I confirmed a number of interviewees, all of whom were amiable and eager to participate, a symptom, to my mind, of an urge to perform the novelistic as a kind of abstract moral value (an urge I found relatable). During the phone calls, it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn’t time or space to account for or to avow with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one’s life, to assert one’s enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where does it pile up? Inside us, as routinized as oxygen? Or is it like dust, a porous, vulnerable, almost unperceivable film covering everything? In one’s mouth, would it taste like the earth?