Will > Books: gay-and-lesbian‎ (11)

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won’t smile.... People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....

…beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.

…the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet-we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together or go down to the Duke’s—we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.

…as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.

To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.

“Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be.”

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.
Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.
Elaine just said she was surprised it didn’t happen more often.

For months now she has been having the same dream Of a flood that sweeps through the house Carries off clothes from the wardrobes Toys from the cupboards Food from the table In the dream she is trying to stop it She is wading around, pulling things out of the water But there’s too much to hold in her arms and it overcomes her The current grows stronger Pulls away the appliances the kitchen island tiles from the floor paint from the at the edge of the water watching her go Staring down as she’s swept past In their eyes she is old Her youth is gone too It has all been washed away by the water

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown. He saw her screaming, her poor terrified face beneath his, as she writhed in flames on the living-room carpet. And the child too! Though she hadn’t yet been born, she was there too. All night he listened to her scream in his head – he couldn’t sleep from it, he just lay there and sobbed, because he knew he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect her enough…

When Dad was fun everything was fun. Not just holidays, not just Christmas. Going to the supermarket! Cutting the grass! At bedtime they had pyjama races, they read Lord of the Rings cover to cover, they put a torch under their chins and told each other ghost stories…

Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed.

…is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?

…the pesticide the farmers use on plants contains a neuro-toxin that destroys their memory so they forget their way home, can’t make it back to the hive where they live, and that’s why they’re dying out. When they looked in the hives they found them not full of dead bees, but mysteriously empty. Maybe that’s what happened to Cass, you think. Maybe air pollution in the city has damaged her brain and now she’s forgotten her home. Though really you know it started way before she came here.

I wrote Imelda’s section, and I knew she was on her way to this dinner… I wrote that first line like she, well, she needs to use the bathroom really urgently. And I put commas in and a full stop. And it did not feel right at all. The only way to write it was without the punctuation, and I wanted it to feel like you’re in her head. She doesn’t parse things in the same educated way that Dickie or indeed the kids would do. She just thinks in this much more immediate, intensive way. When you go from the kids’ sections into Imelda’s section, I wanted it to feel like, woah, there’s a change in gear here. Like there’s something’s going on that hasn’t been apparent up until now. At this moment in her life, but maybe at every point in her life, everything feels extremely precarious. She’s on this knife edge, all the time. She always feels like everything’s going to collapse, the floor is going to disappear from under her and she’s going to just tumble down into the past with her abusive dad and the poverty and the grimness and stuff. - from the. Hindustani Times interview

Nature in her eyes was almost as bad as sports. The way it kept growing? The way things, like crops or whatever, would die and then next year they came back? Did no one else get how creepy that was?

or

Behind him, another boy, not as tall but slightly droopier, had started kissing Elaine. It was distracting; it seemed like she could hear it even over the metal, a squelching noise like walking on frogspawn.

or

It feels weird reading a prayer off his phone, where he has looked at so many unreligious things. He hopes the Virgin Mary knows it’s meant for her, that he’s not praying to e.g. Candy Crush or Pornhub.

Ireland is a place where people are very good at talking. People are so funny and have such brilliant stories, and it’s a way to disguise what you’re actually feeling. The reason, I think, is because this is a place where very terrible things have happened and the way we deal with them is by not addressing them. So I feel like the ghosts are alive and they’re active. The past is affecting what you’re doing in a very real way. And if you don’t address the issues, then the darkness just grows, and the damage gets passed down from one generation to the next, like in the book. – from the Guardian interview

Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave

Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave it to you? Do you even remember who it was?
I’ll tell you this: when you’re thirteen and your mother gives you your first good kiss, you better hope someone matches it or eclipses it—soon. That’s your only hope.

Autobiography just isn’t good or bad enough to work as fiction… Unrevised, real life is just a mess.

”That’s just who you are, Adam,” my older cousin said. “There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.”

Ghosts don’t just warn us about the future; they remind us of what we’ve forgotten about the past. All this is to say, I have a history of being interested in ghosts. And here come the ghosts again. In my new novel…the ghosts are more prominent than before; the ghosts, or hints of ghosts, begin and end the novel.

“My life could be a movie,” you hear people say, but what do they mean? Don’t they mean their lives are too incredible to be real—too unbelievably good or bad? “My life could be a movie” means you think movies are both less than realistic and more than you can expect from real life. “My life could be a movie” means you think your life has been special enough to get made as a movie; it means you think your life has been spectacularly blessed or cursed.
But my life is a movie, and not for the usual self-congratulatory or self-pitying reasons. My life is a movie because I’m a screenwriter. I’m first and foremost a novelist, but even when I write a novel, I’m a visualizer—I’m seeing the story unfold as if it were already on film.

Imagining the stories you want to write, and waiting to write them, is part of the writing process—like thinking about the characters you want to create, but not creating them. Yet when I did this, when I was just a kid at Exeter—when I thought about writing all the time, but I never finished anything I was writing—this amounted to little more than daydreaming.

you don’t see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you’ve missed.

Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened—or it almost happened, could have happened—we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful—­depending on our inclination.

…because those novels have always represented the model of the form for me. I loathed Hemingway. I thought Faulkner was excessive. Fitzgerald was ok, but lazy at times. I was enamored of the kind of novel all of my classmates at school despised.

…the dead don’t entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.

“You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”

“You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”

Short, thin, with narrow shoulders. The head just a little too big for that slight body, skull-like, all forehead and cheekbones, narrow as a trowel at the mouth.

If she had a choice, if she’d learned anything tonight, she would never speak to any of them again. But she knew, here, too, that this wasn’t how things would work out. She would find a way to call Stacy, and later find a way to ask Wolfboy’s forgiveness. And inside she would hate them both a little for knowing her too long, for not letting her change, not letting her find out who she really was. What she was, what she wanted to be, or what she wanted others to see in her was that song “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols, just emptied out and gone, as if someone better than Ted or Chris or anyone ever asked her, that’s what she would say and if they laughed, she would beat them to the ground like she had Wolfboy. Or she wouldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t.

I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. In the late ’80s a mall was built in the next town over, and at its center — as far as I was concerned — was this dark arcade where I would occasionally run into people I knew from school or others of my age from nearby towns. I feel like in my pre-teen imagination the place was a kind of salon for dorks like me. Of course, I’d only have 15 or 20 minutes to roam around wasting quarters while my mom was looking at shoes or something. But it’s buried deep in there, and through that memory I discovered the character of Debbie, who is much cooler than I ever was, and much tougher. - from the Bookweb interview

Originally, he’d pictured retiring at fifty-nine to be filled with travel and projects around the house. Instead he’d spent most of his time puttering from room to room and getting on his wife’s nerves. She wasn’t used to him being around all day…what he really wanted to tell her he couldn’t put together in words. Something about how he missed her so desperately, how it seemed anymore they were strangers passing on a sidewalk, how he’d started to itch with this feeling that he’d wasted all his life doing next to nothing.

As she spoke about it all, he began to see it in his mind, and as it formed, he felt a warm glow at the base of his neck. Here was a dream, yes, and the two of them, connected to it only by hearsay, frolicked in its possibilities. A town was more like a family, spreading out in all directions, changing its neighboring towns like falling dominoes. The vision of this better place seemed so easy to make true, and he had to stop himself from reaching out and taking her hand in his. To his surprise they had already become friends.

The image I kept in my head as I wrote and revised was of a painting with a foreground and background. In the foreground are these characters in each of their stories, but looming behind them is this shared background…this structure allowed me to create a sense of characters flowing through history, absorbed in their personal lives even though we (readers, I mean) can see and understand that history, those bigger shifts happening around and to them. - from the Vol. 1 Brooklyn interview

He looked up into the deep vastness above, hoping for a shooting star to arc earthward, something he could take home as a sign. But there was only the chill in the air and the big country around him, floating loose, unmoored, starved for meaning.

“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”
…My mother turned her face to me ov

“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”
…My mother turned her face to me over her shoulder. “What came,” she said, “was night, and all its names.”

…not all migrations end with a return home. Every memory begins to cut if you hold onto it too tight.

If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will find
that all the birds, be they thirty or forty or more,
are but the shadows cast by that unveiling.
What shadow is ever separated from its maker?
Do you see?
The shadow and its maker are one and the same,
so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries. - from that poem

The first funeral I attended was held under a black froth of wings. The deceased was a crow that had been gashed in the belly by a red-tailed hawk…That was the day my body started conspiring against me. I’d gotten my period.

I am tied by blood to Syria, and the country where my father was born is suffering while the country in which I was born still views us as not fully American. Where, then, does that leave me? And for people of Syrian descent living in diaspora, particularly for the generation of children who will grow up in exile because their parents left Syria for safety reasons, what can we take with us? What do we carry with us that cannot be lost? - from the Goodreads interview

We parted. I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“Tell me something beautiful,” you said.
I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true, that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.
You clasped my chilled hand in yours and lowered your gaze to our fingers. I hoped I’d said the right thing. My mother always used to say that people in mourning prefer not to talk about the earth.
“What a wonderful thing,” you said, “for just one instant, to be so close to God.”

…we can never run with our lies indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We can choose the when not the if. And the

…we can never run with our lies indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We can choose the when not the if. And the longer we wait, the more painful and uncertain it will be.

This is how I lived back then—through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armor against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.

Some people, some events, make you lose your head. They’re like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and after.

It felt as if the words and thoughts of the narrator—despite their agony, despite their pain—healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing.

My life was a tiny narrow corridor with no doors leading off it, a tunnel so narrow it bruised my elbows, with only one way to go. That or the void I told myself. That or leave.

It rained for days on end. The drops drummed onto the rooftops and hammered the streets. Thunder growled like the anger of our forefathers. It felt like the city was under attack, like the city and its streets might begin to give way, dissolve, its life flowing into the Wisla and out into the cold depths of the sea.

We swam, fearless and free and invisible in the brilliant dark.

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an indi

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly…sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

======================================
“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you.”

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open to them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

Reading was particularly hard, and he suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, though he says now: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” - from The Rumpus

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron…

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.
Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.
or
the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
or
I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

Are you lost if you know where you are going—just not how to get there?

Are you lost if you know where you are going—just not how to get there?

“If you grow up between two places the gap is a blessing and also an inner torment. You want so badly to be of a place but that’s not your lot.  When people talk about Nigeria being a difficult place we all complain about it. Listening to the sound of generator, stuck in traffic, suffering inconveniences doesn’t make you feel good. If something happens to me will I get the medical help I need? Every Nigerian is acutely aware of that but other things make it wonderful to live here. You’re around your family. There’s extended family and a sense of community. You’re in a place where you see people hustling and pushing. That gives you energy. - from The Guardian interview

“I’ve always been interested in the way that people process trauma,” Iweala explains.  “This one deals with, in vague terms, police brutality – how individuals and societies process the trauma around them. – from the Guardian interview

a series of interlinked narratives set in Washington, DC—that explores the themes of choice, freedom, and what we must compromise to live in a secure society. The book follows six different characters as they interact with one another and the city in which they live.

I was like a bird who stashed every feather it molted. I’d nested in old selves for too long, afraid I’d need them again.

I was like a bird who stashed every feather it molted. I’d nested in old selves for too long, afraid I’d need them again.

For the first time I understood why queer people changed their names. It was about more than trying to be different or weird, though maybe it was a little bit that, to go by Tiger or Ace or Ponyboy or Dirtbag or whatever, my future girlfriend Flynn adding the F to her name. The name they gave you belongs to someone else, their invention of you; if you turn out not to be that person, you have to name yourself. But I stayed Andrea—I couldn’t let go entirely of the person I’d always been. The tyranny of family love is that you can’t help but love people who think God can’t stand the sight of you.

It seemed in our urgency to redefine ourselves against the norm, we’d formed a church of our own, as doctrinaire as any, and we too abhorred a heretic.

…I’ve read all your books

…I’ve read all your books and I know what you do—I mean, in your writing. You make all these sexual extremes seem normal—that is what you do. Like Gee, that girl, or whatever she is—or what she’s becoming. You create these characters who are so sexually ‘different,’ as you might call them—or ‘fucked up,’ which is what I would call them—and then you expect us to sympathize with them, or feel sorry for them, or something.

“Yes, that is more or less what I do,” I told him. (p 424)