Filthy Animals Brandon Taylor Quotes

They called you brave when you went limping through your life, as if the very difficulty of it were a sign of moral courage or valour. But there was nothing noble in suffering. There was nothing brilliant or good about the failed endeavour to exit one’s life.

The way some people could choose to be in a moment with others or not. It was a choice he didn’t have access to, personally. He always felt that he was arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on.

She could have told Marta anything at all, and Marta would have believed her. But maybe that’s what love was, she thought to herself as she fell asleep. Maybe love was that you didn’t try too hard to tell the difference. Maybe love was just believing something to be true because you’d been told. • • •

The world had not seemed dangerous to him until that moment. That was the blessing of certain childhoods. The illusion of your invincibility. Your safety. Some people didn't know the danger they were in until years later, looking back. That was a kind of blessing, too, in a way. The ignorance of your own peril.

It seemed sad that it would fade or that things had to end. When he was a child, that had depressed him. When his mother read him stories, he’d bawl at the end even if the little duck found its way back to its mother or the bears and the girl became friends or green eggs and ham were eaten. It didn’t matter if the story had a happy ending or if things turned out okay and all the scary things were put away. He hated that vertiginous feeling of things ending. That sense of the world dropping off under his feet.

She wanted to say something about that to Peter, about Irina and how the trees grew more beautiful just as they seemed to die for the season, and how that was a sign of life. Only living things got to die, after all. She had not understood that before, but now she did, and she wanted to say some of it to Peter, hoping he'd say it to Irina. That dying meant you had lived.

Charles had too much self-respect to consider himself a contemporary dancer. He had been classically trained, or whatever passed for classical in Maine, and he had certain ideas about what that meant.

Charles always felt dirty, implicated. The act of telling her held a mirror up to what he’d done, which was ordinary and base and simple and just the kind of thing that people did with one another or to one another, but somehow, in the duplicating that retelling required, it became something else. When he could see himself, really see himself, he didn’t like what he saw.