"Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet."
— Michelle Tea (Rose of No Man's Land)

"Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth: A Novel)

"I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something."
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America: Parts One and Two)

"...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)

"Straight people are the most pathetic of all. I’ve never seen such a miserable group of people in my life. They don’t know anything about themselves"
— Sarah Schulman (Rat Bohemia)

"Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories."
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)

"
...They looked at each other for a while their gazes steady, unblinking. It was the way people stare at each other not when they're in love but afterward, when they finally realize all the many horrible and beautiful things locked up within that love."
— Brock Clarke (Carrying the Torch: Stories)

"It is very frustrating not to be understood in this world. If you say one thing and keep being told that you mean something else, it can make you want to scream. But somewhere in the world there is a place for all of us, whether you are an electric form of decoration, peppermint-scented sweet, a source of timber, or a potato pancake."
— Lemony Snicket (The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story)