Tim Murphy > Quotes

“She could feel the Melancholy Demon bearing down.”
― Tim Murphy, Christodora

“Lying in the hotel bed, Hector conceded that, all through ’93, ’94, and ’95, an ever-widening river of good data, mixed with a steady ambient wash of self-importance, had anesthetized his grief. He’d needed that. But now a maw of emptiness and rage was opening beneath him. Idly, he rubbed his bare, trimmed chest beneath the sheets. He’d faithfully hit the gym through these past years of high-level consultancy, grunting out his misery over barbells and machines. His chest was broad and he wished beyond anything that the arm caressing it at this moment was Ricky’s, not his own. But that sunny, silly cutie, like a blond sliver of sunshine on the timeline that Hector envisioned as his life, had missed the drawbridge, along with Issy and Korie and a baleful lot of others. It had all happened in the very, very worst years of sickness and death, Clinton’s first term, overwhelming loss mingled confusingly with tidings of the coming respite.”
― Tim Murphy, Christodora

“CouverPrtyBud: Wassup rican? RicanTopStud57: Wassup? CouverPrtyBud: You go out tonight? RicanTopStud57: Just dinner. In town for work. At the Hyatt. CouverPrtyBud: Nice. Want company? RicanTopStud57: Swap pics?”
― Tim Murphy, Christodora

“You might be left to distract or soothe yourself with the outlier possibility that the other person had been kidnapped or struck by a car or lightning, or had perhaps inadvertently fallen into a giant hole in the ground on their way to you. But mostly you would just be thrown back on yourself, left with the extra-ness of your own anticipation, time, and energy that suddenly had no container. The moment felt existential, as though all your life you’d been showing up to find people who weren’t there and had never had any intention of being there.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team

“That’s what a relationship is, right? Two people helping each other make a better version of themselves. Or I guess that’s what it should be.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team

“It had never occurred to me that she was perhaps trying to hold on to her Blackness in a world where we denied her that merely because she defied our stereotypes of what a Black person should be, that perhaps she was dreaming of a future where she and other brainy Black people could discuss Black literature together free from the puzzled gaze of white people whose picture they didn’t fit into.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team

“No crush will imprint itself on your hippocampus like your high-school crush, such that even seeing their name in print years later will make you catch your breath and recall a kind of beauty that has gone unrivaled by all the succeeding beauties.”
― Tim Murphy, Speech Team