Aidan > Aidan's Quotes

“The historical record demonstrates that, on the contrary, many homosexuals chose heterosexuality and failed to maintain it because choice is less powerful than destiny.”
― Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity

“When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last—and wouldn't end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“The war on drugs thrives on ignorance of drugs and misplaced faith in the power of the law to regulate human vice.”
― Tom Feiling

“Many educators are loth to admit that the pursuit of pleasure might be a valid reason for drug use, or to recognize young people's curiosity, their need to experiment, to take risks and define their own boundaries.”
― Tom Feiling, The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World

“The self is a repeatedly reconstructed biological state.”
― Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.”
― Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.”
― Natsume Soseki, Kokoro

“Yet that's how it felt for years and years -- that Andover ground me beneath the heel of its Bass Weejuns because it needed losers to make its golden Adonises shine even brighter. I wandered through so lost and sad, I can't believe nobody ever asked me what was wrong. Nothing, I would have said, by which I would have meant Everything.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“I could only dimly articulate it then, but I think I believed that Art would give me entry into a no-man's-land where the laws of straight no longer applied. And that once I touched the soul of another artist, a comrade in arms, the bodies would fall into place like folds of a garment, twining us in a passion of the flesh. Pretty high-falutin', and an awful lot of effort just to get a man to go to bed with you.”
― Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

“After all, what is ''a man'' nowadays? Somebody who stands alone, independent of all ties.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Our society seems to say that a real man needs and wants nobody.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“But since the time of Leibnitz, it is hard to find philosophers who stress relatedness in any way. There is Henri Bergson, and before him the romantics, and Marx with his talk of the brotherhood of revolution, and Martin Buber with his I and Thou, but by and large modern philosophy is about aloneness. We are forlorn, abandoned.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“But we Americans scrap relationships that are not working as we would like -- whether they be with relatives, with spouses, or with friends. We dispose of them like Kleenex. When it is inconvenient, painful, difficult, I get rid of you. I hit the road.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Frequently, friendship is represented as something too steadily pleasant, or in certain of the masterpieces of the past -- Aristotle and Cicero, for example -- as pervaded by a constant mutual understanding and a gentle calm. Friendship is also an emotional relationship, with involvement that can get hot at times, like any other deep involvement with a person.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“To realize the importance the imagination could have in friendship, to understand its immense power for bringing us together in a way.”
― Stuart Miller

“For love, we've got to be alone, together. We've got to close out everyone else.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Innocence revived is the freshening rain of life on dead and wintered fields.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Being shameless in thinking, then talking, about male friendship because it is important. Make room for friendship in your life. Make a federal case out of it.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Our attitudes toward human relationships are those of supermarket shoppers: we want what is cheap and quick and easy; we want variety; and we want novelty. But friendship requires a whole other set of mind.”
― Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship

“Homosexuality is not a political choice; it is dictated by the imperatives of desire.”
― Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity

“A grown man who can shed tears without embarrassment is like a yogi who has learned to expel toxic matter from his body by consciously speeding up the peristaltic rhythm. He can eliminate many of life's poisons”
― Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind

“The imagination is always more horrible than the truth.”
― Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991

“Common sense is not so common.”
― Voltaire, A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“I'm not able to rid myself of my self.”
― Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991

“Somewhat melancholy happiness of offering an object one likes, and that one had bought for oneself!”
― Hervé Guibert, The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991

“The assertion that there are an infinite number of homosexualities is a political statement rather than an observable fact.”
― Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity

“Homophobia is a construct while homosexuality is innate.”
― Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity

“The degree to which language exactly mirrors reality is debatable.”
― Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity

“To be a cocksucker is to be oriented towards a specific gender.”
― Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity