These Violent Delights Micah Nemerever Quotes

He couldn’t stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly

I hope you looked west while I was looking east, and that for a moment you met my eyes without knowing it. I know you never look away, ever when your eyes are closed, but I'm never certain you can see what's really there. I miss you to pieces. Yours Always - J

It always makes me a little sad when you laugh," Julian went on. "The way it sort of takes you by surprise. I love it, it has that sweet sincerity that's the best part of you, but it still kills me how you never seem to expect it. All I want to do is make you happy, and you're the unhappiest person I've ever met.

All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

He remembered the way love had burned through him like a flame under glass, grasping outward, devouring what air it had left before it choked.

I kill them because they're beautiful, and it's the only way I can keep them.

He wanted to forget he'd ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.

Side by side they are twin angels on a headstone, cold and terrible and immutable. They were boys once, he remembers, but they aren't anymore.

The opening move was circled in red.

Believe in the things I try to tell you instead of the things you think you deserve to be told. Keep writing. It doesn't matter what about. Please keep writing.

If you paint a masterpiece and then set it on fire, it still would have mattered. If you know you’ve made something beautiful, who cares how long it lasts.

Of course they would promise each other everything. Of course eternity would yield to them once they'd earned it.

There’s this idea in psychoanalysis that I’ve always liked.” Julian pulled himself closer and rested his head in the crook of Paul’s arm. “It’s that what we call ‘love’ is actually letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person—you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there’s nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too.

I always think of a passage from the Symposium, this allegory about people who started off as two halves of a whole, but then something cut them apart, and they spend their whole lives looking for their other half so they can fit themselves back together. And that's how it feels, it hurts, it's like I lost you before I was born.

They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.

What happens if I lose you again?" Paul didn't mean to ask it aloud, but he couldn't stop himself. "You don't." "How do I know that?" A sharp, inscrutable smile. "You don't.

If I have to deal with one more person today, I'll fucking kill myself." Paul almost snapped at him, but he didn't want to explain why the threat made him feel sick. Instead he said, very quietly, "I can leave." "Don't be dumb," said Julian, "you don't count.

He endured it to punish himself, and to prove to himself that he could; those were the only two reasons he ever chose to do anything worthwhile.

—and I had to see you like that,” said Julian, “this poor beautiful boy who can be so sweet and gentle when he can bring himself to trust me, who wants to save the world because he feels all the ways it hurts, he feels

I don’t think you’ve ever felt anything that didn’t hurt you,” Julian said. “We’ve found each other, out of everyone else in the world. Does that hurt, too?

...Paul realized he had been wrong all along to imagine his family wanted him to metamorphose into something softer and kinder and more docile. It was much simpler than that. All they actually wanted him to do was lie.

But when they were alone, he could promise himself that he and Julian were each other's birthright, and that the only unnatural thing was the fact that their blood was divided between two bodies. He could believe that even calling it "sex" was incorrect, because it wasn't about anything so shallow as physical desire. They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

Their fathers make their fortunes pouring poison into the sky. What's a little one-on-one torture when you know the world is yours to ruin?

You figure out on your own what’s good and what isn’t, and maybe that idea ends up being rigid, but that’s better than not having anything at all.

In the end, there wasn’t any difference between trusting someone and underestimating them.

And then they act like you're crazy when do you speak up, just to drive the point home that being shy is safer?

All along it had been Paul who was meant to plead for mercy. The real violence was in how gentle Julian was—how near his reassurances came to absolution while stopping just short of granting it.

You’re fine. Not that you need to care. Think for a second about what ‘normal’ means.

I love you.” Julian spoke without looking at him. He was watching the ceiling fan slice uselessly through the thick air. “I really do. I wish you could tell.

All he could think about was throwing himself against a wall, over and over, until he’d smashed himself into shards so fine that the void inside him could finally slip free.

He’s exhausted, he thinks, because it’s easier to remedy than being lonely.

But inevitably FACT: Being apart is an abhorrent void. It would consume us alive. - CONCLUSION: Self-evident. Isn’t it? This is the only choice we have. When he needs to he will understand.

Paul hated the look of his own bare wrists, with their shining blue veins and the skin stretched too thin to hold them in place. They reminded him that his body was a thing that could be taken apart.

He wanted to tear through Julian’s skin and map the shapes of liver and lungs, to memorize the path of every artery with his fingertips. He wanted to break Julian’s body open and move inside it alongside him, rib cages interlaced around a single heart.

Grief was normal enough that it felt almost safe, and Paul could imagine enduring it forever. He might be able to suspend the two of them together in amber, so long as his unhappiness remained the same.

Julian pulled himself closer and rested his head in the crook of Paul's arm. "It's that what we call 'love' is actually letting your identify fill in around the shape of the other person - you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there's nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too". Only as permanent as I am, Paul wanted to say.

He decided to learn to be impulsive, which meant planning the impulse so exhaustively that he could almost ignore his misgivings.

His face was so blank that Paul could read anything he wanted in his features. He chose disgust.

In hindsight his frustrations and fears would be taken as evidence that he was still human—but in the present, before he’d made anything of himself, they meant he was only human.

the worst damage humans do isn’t rooted in malice but in thoughtlessness

behavioral norms can’t function as a conscience—the purpose of social norms is to norm, not to attain moral perfection

Of course he made every promise Julian asked of him, because they’d hurt each other enough, and it was the only mercy he could offer.

When she met Paul's eyes, it was as if she were seeing him for the first time. He couldn't remember why he'd ever wanted to be seen.

Do you want me to kill them?

He usually hurried to console Paul if he wept, no matter how trivial or foolish the injury. It was only now that he withheld the comfort that Paul understood the full power Julian held over him.

Since his death his father's absence had spilled far past the carefully drawn outlines his father had occupied when he was alive. It had flowed into every available space and settled there, and there was no chance Julian hadn't noticed it.

The most prevailing concern of These Violent Delights, of course, is the kind of toxic and identity-consuming romantic friendship that many queer people experience in their teens. While obsessive love is clearly not bound by gender or orientation, there is, I think, a dialectic of both wanting and wanting to be that is specific to same-gender relationships of this kind. My own experiences of these relationships felt like another latent threat I carried inside me, one that fed off my alienation from the outside world by affirming it.

You are just as I always knew you would be," she said. "Curly hair, sad eyes. Quite striking, in your way. His sweethearts always are.

Stillness and vulnerability were so foreign to Julian's body that sleep looked unnatural on him.

Don’t be so eager to get your feelings hurt, it’s boring and beneath you.

I need to make something beautiful, something that lasts. I don’t know what, but I have to, if I want my life to matter at all.

All they were - all they had ever been - was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

He had all but pleaded for it, the precision and scalpel-sharp intimacy of Julian’s cruelty. He had needed to remember that they were monstrous together, merciless, twins conjoined at the teeth.

Beautiful things are supposed to hurt. It’s what I was saying earlier—even if you don’t know how you’re going to create something that matters, you can still want to do it so badly you can barely think about anything else—

He was getting better at giving his family the lies they wanted. That wasn't the same as the lies becoming easier. It wasn't Julian's kind of lying. Paul couldn't invent a new reality from whole cloth, much less pretend to believe it. But he'd developed a surprising intuition for which fragments of himself his family could tolerate, and he was able, with effort, to slice away every extraneous truth until only the acceptable parts of him were visible.

Julian could witness suffering and endure it, so long as it was under enough control that he could tease apart how it worked. Once he knew the shape of someone else’s pain, he could break off a piece of it—claim it as his own, keep it as a memento under glass—and know they would be grateful to him for taking it away.

What a lonely, dreary thing it is to know the truth. What a relief it is that now neither of us has to be alone in knowing. I hope you looked west while I was looking east, and that for a moment you met my eyes without knowing it. I know you never look away, even when your eyes are closed, but I'm never certain you can see what's really there.

Paul observed Julian's compassion with more unease than fondness. The kindness was sincere, but so was the fascination. Julian could witness suffering and endure it, so long as it was under enough control that he could tease apart how it worked. Once he knew the shape of someone else's pain, he could break off a piece of it- claim it as his own, keep it as a memento under glass -and know they would be grateful to him for taking it away.

Paul watched Strauss's wife as he spoke, only half-listening. They looked like siblings, in the way married couples often did; Paul wondered if men and women did that on purpose, choosing mates who were otherwise much like them in order to mitigate the other gender's unfamiliarity.

There was something mesmerizing about the way Julian moved—carelessly graceful, as if he weren’t excruciatingly conscious of every atom he displaced. Paul had tried all his life to erase the anxious delicacy in his own gestures, especially the hesitant motions of his hands. For a while he thought he could teach his body to follow Julian’s somehow, if only he practiced long enough. He spent hours in front of his bedroom mirror, trying to relax into that loose-limbed elegance. But Paul was fettered and careful, and even his weak imitation of Julian’s posture looked wrong.

All he could do was force a smile and hope that they would all be gone before he had a chance to disappoint them.

The fantasy of the house fire had brought them to an impossible truth. They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.

if she had simply chosen to feel better without showing him how to do the same, he would never forgive her.

They had to choose carefully—just the right weak point where they could leave their indelible mark. A single person, their pliant and obedient opposite, who carried atrocity inside him like a loaded gun.

Paul wasn’t sure he would ever grow used to it—this precipitous thrill of being seen and known and understood.

He wanted to forget he’d ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.

If you painted a masterpiece and then set it on fire, it still would have mattered. If you know you’ve made something beautiful, who cares how long it lasts? Après toi, le déluge.

He had promised to let Julian speak without arguing; the promise was the only thing that kept him steady. There was no revering him anymore. Only love remained, and it was a fragile thing that Paul had been desperate not to see. He couldn't stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were--all they had ever been was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

In the end, there wasn’t any difference between trusting someone and underestimating them.

They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself over a wound.

Once he knew the shape of someone else’s pain, he could break off a piece of it—claim it as his own, keep it as a memento under glass—and know they would be grateful to him for taking it away.

Paul wondered if men and women did that on purpose, choosing mates who were otherwise much like them in order to mitigate the other gender’s unfamiliarity

Moral laziness as the root of all ills

If you observe social phenomena from a distance, you often only see evidence that conforms to your hypothesis—‘objectivity’ is a lie scientists tell themselves

Julian moved through every part of Paul’s life the same way—not entitled, nothing so crass and insecure, but taking for granted that Paul would allow him anywhere. His was an arrogant intimacy, the kind that followed Paul home without asking and spent the afternoon examining the bookcases and pantry shelves.