The Teras Trials Quotes

“I have a priest in my ear calling me a sinner, and a devil on my shoulder desperate for the intimacy. For the love. God, is it such a sin to want to be loved?”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“Something about the horridness of the world means I crave to lose myself completely in another. I get so wrapped up in the sin of it, the layered transgressions I make against God—I cannot marry my lover, my lover is a man—that I briefly forget none of it really matters, in the end. What use is there in getting worked up about my so-called sins when living to thirty is a luxury? Hell is here. Hell is on earth, clawing at London’s walls. And if I can live a little happier for taking someone to bed, why shouldn’t I do it”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“How much I love being wanted. Perhaps it’s pathetic that the smallest bit of respect makes me glad, but I will take what I can get.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I want him to see me as an honest man. A stupid one, maybe, but honest”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“And it’s the first time I realise how insane empathy is. This is the first time in a very long time someone is caring about me, without concern for themselves.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I live to haunt and hound you.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“And like Orestes, I am polluted by that sin.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“But I wish very deeply in that moment to go back to a time where my body was completely untouched. Before the lion, the harpy, the first time a man touched me. Before my father beat me. Before I knew what this world was. I wish I could do it all again and do it better this time. Do it right. God, please—let me be perfect.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“For any Christian reading, it isn’t that I’ve decided to hate the Lord. I want the embrace of the Church and the absolution that comes with prayer. But I want, too, my body. I want to use it. I want to feel something with it. And there’s nothing quite so perfect as giving myself to men; of having the beauty that is men touch me. And I don’t think I can admit it’s a sin. Certainly not when the act is tender, but also not when it is rough, debasing. It’s all love. It’s all love for my body. Perhaps I don’t feel guilt for what I do. Perhaps I feel guilty because it is expected.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I want to tell him: This is my place, you blaspheming devil. My religion. My God. If you are faithless, so be it. But don’t taint mine”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“You have bared your soul to an agent of the institution who does not care if you live or die. Who will gladly add your sins to its arsenal should it need to put you in your place.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“By now, it’s obvious that I’m uncontrollable. I smoke, and I drink, and I lose myself in laudanum. I have sinned. I will sin again. I’ve fucked. I’ve taken pleasure in another man. If Leo wants me tonight, I will let him fuck into me until he’s spent, because I enjoy it. I’ve enjoyed myself, writhing beneath him—and my brother is dead. And people my age are dying. And this place wills it so.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“My mind starts to come undone. I fancy it is my soul, unpicking itself from the flesh, hoping to fly through the greenhouse and out, up into the dreary English sky. I think of Corinthians, and Paul, and the second coming of Jesus, and the transformation of this mortal flesh into a glorified body. When I might taunt death. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“God,” Leo moans on entry, “God,” and it’s the most beautiful prayer I’ve ever heard. A blessing and a begging all in one”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I might debase myself by crawling into their lap and weeping. Just for a moment of peace. A moment of affection. I can’t let that happen. I can’t let them see me slithering and desperate and in pain”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I can’t pretend I was made perfectly, but neither can I pretend that God instilled desire in me he did not wish me to follow. I reject the belief that I am being tested. It should not be my fault that God made men so beautiful”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“And maybe he was a monster, in the end—maybe that’s the truth of how the University trains us—but he wasn’t always one. He was a good man. Sometimes. And I can stay a good man. Sometimes.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“It is the rage of a man who had come so close — God, I had come so damned close to real purpose, real drive and satisfaction— and here is just another wretched place. I want to lie down. I have that sinking feeling in me, where lying down forever feels attractive.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“This fear isn’t new to me, but it’s been so long that I have felt so utterly alone.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I feel the brunt of my grief at that moment. I am my father’s queer son. I am not the one he wanted. Their golden boy is dead, and I am all that is left, and here is a pretty boy showing me attention, and that is all it takes for me to want him”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“If anyone should let me continually kiss your honey-sweet eyes, Juventius—” “—I would kiss them three hundred thousand times, and I should never have enough.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“Dionysian mysteries are all about control—or the lack thereof. Of losing it, of seeing every refined thing in you melt away. My heart begins to race. I want to know the meaning. I want to understand.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I want to learn. But I also want to live. I covet the knowledge in the books, the way to protect myself and my family if it ever comes down to it.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“When I feel the tears press forward, I give myself the luxury of screaming—but only in my imagination. I envision myself bending over in the snow, ripping at my skin, the glorious pain of stinging scratches grounding this body to the world. I imagine beating the trees and howling, howling like a teras on a hunt. I revel in the imagined ecstasy and it’s still not enough.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“Sophocles said fate has a terrible power. And with my father’s voice, I hear the quote. “You cannot escape it by wealth or war. No fort will keep it out, no ships outrun it.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“Worship of the threat is instituted to avert it”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“And then I see Thaddeus. We are children. Nothing bad has happened to us. Thaddeus is calm and sweet, and our father is at sea and his anger is never around to seep into us. No one screams at us. No one beats us. I am six and Thad is eleven and he tells me he will always look out for me. He will be the man who protects the Jones’ family. I know Thaddeus is no longer this boy. He is angry and violent, but he has given his whole life to protect me. I am softer than him because he took the brunt of it all—every bad thing in this world has always gone through him first. Am I meant to leave him to die? I can’t. I won’t. We share the trauma of being the sons of Mr and Mrs Jones. There is no one else in this world who understands.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“Whenever the high drifts away, I am left with the remains of something heavy and unsettling. My body feels absent. My skin feels wrapped around the wrong bones. I can feel every tendon working like an old and rusty automaton, everything squeaking and on the verge of breaking. To put it simply, it leaves me feeling wrong.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“I get down on my knees and clasp my hands and whisper a pleading and desperate prayer to a God who rarely thinks of me.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials

“He wants me to bear the masculine apathy our father pushed upon us, but I feel too much to ever be very good at that.”
― Lucien Burr, The Teras Trials