Do you know how frustrating it is to watch a man who is VERY gay for his best friend dance around his feelings for a whole book only to realize them to late, have a sad but beautiful gay moment with him for like five pages (at most), have to leave him, lose him, and get a mysterious letter from him and find out he may be alive only for the book to leave you with the ambiguous ending?
"You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough."
"You can't quantify humanity. You can't measure it - not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them."
"I don't know, it's like I look at you and the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway."
"Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?" The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can't help but suppress a smile. "I blame him for all of it."
'She says, “Were you in love with him?” “Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.'
'I need language to live like food - lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.'
'Below was the motto: Per aspera ad astra. I'd heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns to the stars.'
"We cracked up. [...] But we didn't really shatter until we were all back together again."
'The clock on the mantel struck twelve, and we stirred, one by one, like seven statues coming to life.'
'Actors are by nature volatile - alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.'
He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cares if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.