Ro Kwon Quotes

Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.

I believe that we, in the attempt to live, invented Him. But if I could, I'd ask Him to give you everything.

Phoebe, you’re a capable girl, but I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.

I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I'd have no space left to fit my own.

By the time I quit, I realized I’d rather have no talent than just enough to know how much I lacked.

Masculinity was a glass vase perpetually at the edge of the table.

People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn't forget was the joy I'd known, loving Him.

all she wants is to be loved totally, without reason or question or sacrifice. Love is her hands above her head. Love is a riding crop, a whip, a knotted red rope—all things that force her to relinquish the control with which she tightly grips the world.

the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

You can't get enough of something you don't need.

She did not watch pornography; she thought about stopping him as soon as the sex became boring to her.

It seems to me that you are less interested in actually being vulnerable with others and more enamored with the symptoms of your own vulnerability, he wrote.

Sasha wants me to take her somewhere--a place she has no vocabulary for--a place neither of us has been.

I’ve wondered if I’ve stopped being able to want, but maybe it’s just that what I most wish to have again is not, at this point, available.

Kink proves that our desires, no matter how dark they are deemed, are always worthy of being named.” —BRONTEZ PURNELL, author of 100 Boyfriends

You can’t get enough of a thing you don’t need.

She knows that a small, soft animal lives inside her, and that animal wants to be loved completely, flat on its back, kissed and cuddled. She wants that [...] - LARISSA PHAM, AUTHOR OF "Trust

They were like two-thirds of a bar joke: he was an ex-Pentecostal, she was an ex-Catholic, and though she'd been with him for three years, she still refused to let him in the bathroom if she was so much as taking a piss.

This was the thing about being an ex-Christian: like that, your life expectancy went from eternity to seventy-odd years. A death sentence on you and on those you loved. He tried not to think about it; he thought about it all the time.

In a disembodied floating space, S/m offers little pockets of theatricality and connection. So long as they are playing, two people are totally accountable and listening to each other. S/m radically preempts romantic love because it is a practice of it.

Worse yet, he blundered from the start, asking her why she felt she needed to be hurt. “Why are people gay?” she shot back, suddenly unshy. “Why does anyone have a foot fetish? One of my earlier memories is of looking up words related to—to this, in the dictionary. It just happens, you know?

In Life magazine in 1963, James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

Most men would only see bodily fluids when they caught their ejaculate in their hands, or if their life ended at the wrong end of a brawl. but for women, gore was a unit of measurement: monthly cycles, the egg-white slip of arousal, the blood of virginity stolen through force of hand or the force of law, childbirth, fists splitting the skin of the skull, the leak of milk, tears.

They’d have gathered on a rooftop in Noxhurst to watch the explosion.

It had rained his first day out of the gulag, the lines slanting like marionette strings.

Light spilled through closed eyelids, and I was turning into gold.

Faces lit up if I walked into a room, the liking a light I could refract, giving it back. Phoebe, oh, I love that girl, people said, but it's possible they all just loved the reflected selves.

joke. I hadn’t talked much with Liesl, but I would: in time, she’d confide in me, as well. The dad she’d idolized, who left; the men like beads on the string of a furious mother’s life. The anorexic spells. She’d been locked up in a clinic. Obliged to eat, to weigh in. Like a pig for the kill, she said.

I want to live on a planet that can hold us. I believe we can all still help it, us, do so. If nothing else, why not try? Why not hope, and then act as if? This is our one wild, lone home; what other choice do we have? R.O. Kwon

she turned toward me, still unconscious, wrapping me in limbs and warmth, this bleeding, feverish creature I didn’t know how to stop wanting.

And he knows now that he cannot turn back. That he is responsible for this, for her, for making her think that she could trust him, that she could open her heart to him. And he realizes now that he has not stopped to consider, at any moment, the shape of his own heart, if it is a flower or a lock or a door, and if it is a door if that door is closed or open.

She considers it, sitting next to him, who is with her but soon will be leaving, though she doesn’t know it, how little time they have left. She considers her own instincts,

This is what he has wanted, isn’t it? To force the quiet, tight bud to blossom. He has done it with peonies before, cut too soon in the season. He sees it now, the flower opening inside her. The hard, pale green outer shell unfurls to reveal a series of delicate petals, thin as tissue, all different shades of pink, the edges frilled. All of the layers opening, turning back to reveal more and more delicacy of all colors, densely packed, the edges of the petals like little curling tongues.

Do you mind if I ask what made you stop believing? It was nothing special, I said. The usual host of reasons. Like what? Oh, the existence of multiple religions, children starving. The problem of evil- it's how people talk about going bankrupt, right? It's gradual, then it happens all at once.

It must have been so hard, though, she said, expanding. She intended to sympathize, I could tell, and it was true: I'd tried not to leave the faith. I'd had such purpose, living in single-minded pursuit of the God I loved, until the afternoon I knelt in my bedroom, asking one last time for a sign. White gauze curtains rippled. I waited, but I heard nothing else. Muscles stiff, I got up. I should, I think, have told Phoebe how cut open I felt since then, with a God-shaped hole I didn't know how to fill. If I was sick of Christ, it was because I hadn't been able to stop loving Him, this made-up ghost I still grieves as though He'd been real.

I hesitated. She hadn't mentioned a religious upbringing; I knew I'd alluded to mine. I'd joked about it, I was sure. When I was Christian, I said, at times, playing my life's pivotal loss as a joke. Now, I told Phoebe that I'd attended a Bible College before Edwards. Up until I stopped believing in God, I said. I thought I was chosen by Christ. Hand-picked to preach his word. Don't laugh, but I used to peddle salvation outside of town bars, hoping to catch drunks when they'd be extra sentimental. IT worked, too. I was good at it. In the back of my Bible. I listed all the souls I saved.

I watched the protest pass, sick with longing. Such a lot of people who still believed they were picked to be God’s children.

In a lifetime, the average woman will eat her weight in lipstick. To covet is to begin to have.

If I asked the first question, then if I listened, head tilted, providing attention, they let me ask again.

That night, I told my mother I had no option but to quit the piano. I won't be delusional, I said. I didn't have the talent. It wasn't enough to be good. I could see no point in devoting this life to music if I wouldn't add to what leading pianists, the ones I idolized, had achieved. I shouldn't waste time trying.

At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah. —CLARICE LISPECTOR, Água Viva

I kissed bitten nails that shine, in hindsight, like quartz, spoils I pulled down from the moon.

It's often all people want, urging a change: be like me, shaped in this image.

you’re a capable girl, but I’m afraid being alone isn’t a skill. It’s a disposition.