Tyler Lemley > Tyler's Quotes

“But here’s the thing about family, Ryan…blood doesn’t mean shit. You just need to surround yourself with people who do love you, and they become your family.”
― Sarina Bowen, Him

“Love is friendship set in fire.”
― Sarina Bowen, Us

“I…” He clears his throat. “I’d let you do it, though.” My hand freezes in his hair. “You would?” Wes nods. “I’d let you do anything to me, Canning.”
― Sarina Bowen, Him

“God, when I go gay, I really go gay.”
― Sarina Bowen, Him

“Jamie doesn’t leave my side, though. He and I are the calm eye of a friendly, familial hurricane. And I hope the storm will never pass.”
― Sarina Bowen, Him

“That's how it is sometimes--
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you're just too tired to open it.”
― Dorianne Laux, What We Carry

“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”
― Dorianne Laux, The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

“If trees could speak they wouldn't”
― Dorianne Laux, Facts About the Moon

“Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. ”
― Dorianne Laux

“I want to stay on the back porch while the world tilts toward sleep, until what I love misses me, and calls me in.”
― Dorianne Laux

“You are", he says, "the absolute worst idea I've ever had.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“The next slide is titled: 'Exploring your sexuality: Healthy, but does it have to be with the Prince of England?' She apologizes for not having time to come up with better titles. Alex actively wishes for the sweet release of death.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“The phrase 'see attached bibliography' is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“After we're gone
the work of our knives will survive this.”
― Margaret Atwood, Dearly

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am made of memories.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“The body I have shouldn't change how deserving I am of my dreams. - Millie”
― Julie Murphy, Pumpkin

“I wish I knew how to quit you.”
― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

“The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one.”
― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

“He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.”
― Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That smile could melt his bones. It was an aw-shucks grin, a grin that said, I’m trouble, with Wes’s head tilted forward, hiding his open-sky eyes.”
― Tal Bauer, The Jock