Susan Doherty > Susan's Quotes

“We focused our eyes on a dozen quaking aspen, trembling in the breeze, creating ripples of liquid gold. Ernie said, “Did you know, if the leaves can’t move, they get eaten by insects.” We listened to the quiver of a million shimmery yellow leaves, then Ernie said, “The trees look like brothers the way they stand by each other. Not one of them looks sick or in danger of falling by the wayside.”
― Susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“Forever after, I would think that a good book was the antidote to everything. As if a book could fill up the emptiness left by a person. If not a single book, then a shopful.”
― Susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“We ended up sharing a joint lying on the grass on the Tor, watching the sheep—harmless hillside grazers standing around waiting to be eaten or shorn. After a long quiet time, Ernie said, “I wonder if they feel sad when they’re separated from the flock and sent to slaughter? I wonder if the others notice?” His tone was light, but when I glanced over at him, he had pulled out a knife. A real knife, a switchblade.”
― Susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“I was given such a small heart for love. Room for Nathan, and room for you. And just enough space for your mother. Your heart was always bigger than mine, Arthur, and so when you get to my second request, please know that I am counting on you to do what is in the realm of the possible. We had impossible lives. I’ve seen too late that we don’t have to wear the chains those lives forged for us. Don’t think I’m not aware of the length of your own chains, even if you cannot see or feel them anymore.”
― Susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“. Casper promoted child abuse as a soothing sexual orientation, claiming there was nothing wrong with a man and a boy having sex if both consented to it, and then he monetized that aberration. What guarantees consent when you are nine? Tickets to a football match?”
― Susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“We ended up sharing a joint lying on the grass on the Tor, watching the sheep—harmless hillside grazers standing around waiting to be eaten or shorn. After a long quiet time, Ernie said, “I wonder if they feel sad when they’re separated from the flock and sent to slaughter? I wonder if the others notice?”
― susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“I couldn’t stop sobbing long enough to explain that the Zipper had fed some essential part of Ernie when he was a small boy, only to suck him into something that defied extrication.”
― Susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“On train trips, Ernie always wanted the window seat. He knew the names of the trees we passed, and the clouds—nacreous, cumulus, nimbus. He was ever vigilant for animal life and appreciative of the tiny patches of humanity along the tracks that exposed the lives of the rail-side dwellers in such intimate detail. “I love sad houses,” he’d say, pointing to a chorus line of discoloured laundry waving at us, to an upturned self-propelled lawnmower, straggly gardens, leaky drainpipes, a rain-weathered pram that had been turned into a wheelbarrow. “The porch lights are on to keep the rats in their dens,” he’d said. To be a voyeur of decay at such close range was as much of an enthrallment as it was a validation of the scarcities in his own backyard. I knew exactly which days Ernie’s mum had had to choose between heating the house and putting food on the table. My mother had been there too. Before the Zipper had given her a leg up.”
― Susan Doherty, Monday Rent Boy

“We focused our eyes on a dozen quaking aspen, trembling in the breeze, creating ripples of liquid gold. Ernie said, “Did you know, if the leaves can’t move, they get eaten by insects.” We listened to the quiver of a million shimmery yellow leaves, then Ernie said, “The trees look like brothers the way they stand by each other. Not one of them looks sick or in danger of falling by the wayside.”
― Susan Doherty