The House of Hidden Meanings Quotes

“And life reminds me, again and again: You have to dismantle the old to make the space for something new.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Life was just one big fucking joke. Anyone who was taking it seriously was missing the point.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Life comes in seasons. There are the seasons where you are driving through a snowstorm, just trying to keep your eye on the road ahead to stay alive. Your ego stands in the doorway of every good idea, keeping them from you. We avoid the pain. We put our blinders on and stay focused on what’s right ahead, turning away from the thing we need to see in our periphery, because we know accepting it will force us to question everything we hold so tightly. But then there are those seasons when the snow globe is being shaken all around you, and you’re standing in place, looking up to try to see where the scattered world is all going to fall. When it finally settles, that’s when you find yourself in the house of hidden meanings. You study the patterns that keep coming up. You allow them to show you something different, even if it’s the thing you’ve been running from your whole life. You run into the fire, run through the pain, trusting that the only way out is through.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Life is full of dualities: night and day, black and white, yin and yang, good and evil, birth and death, love and fear. You can't have one without the other. It takes two to create the magnetic pull to generate energy in the first place. This is the natural order: that everything, in contrast, hangs in perfect balance.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir

“Much as we seek power in every corner of our lives, it's always already in us. It's impossible to be powerless. If you recognized it, you yourself are power. Life is power.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Life was just like this, sometimes. You think you’re going to sail off into the sunset with Prince Charming, and instead you end up listening to a stranger getting his dick sucked on a Greyhound bus.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear. When you hear stereotypes about Black people who can't swim or are afraid of dogs, it's because for so many generations, they were afraid of swimming across bodies of water to flee, or afraid of dogs because they were scared of being chased. Those fears are epigenetic - they burrow deep into the subconscious, creating an internal paradigm of rules that you forget can be broken. Systemic oppression created walls that can feel impossible to scale, but so, too, does the inherited belief that you are victim. People hold on to that victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity. Nobody's going to take that away from them. It runs too deeply to take out and examine under the light.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir

“All I wanted was to feel something real, something beyond all these mistaken priorities that I was sure didn’t matter.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“I’ve always believed that kindness is the highest form of intellect.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“There are ideological precepts that people will fight or even kill for. But those things are never really what they seem to be. As much as people will claim a hard moral line, that line becomes very blurry depending on what their needs are at any given moment - like the conservative politician who's opposed to abortion, unless it's for his mistress.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir

“Home, I know, is right in this moment—in this body. We have houses everywhere. So I keep my bags packed, to make me resourceful such that I can make magic wherever I am. I let go of my mother’s hand. I go off to school. I go to work. I go out onstage. I leave home, over and over again, and then I come back. I sit on that porch, waiting for my father, knowing that he will never come, and then I let him go, time after time. I say goodbye. How could he be so cruel as to leave me waiting there on that stoop? But I project onto him the consciousness that I have now. I would never make my child wait for me on the front porch—it would be cruel, and I know better. But he didn’t know any better. It never would have occurred to him, because he wasn’t awake. Unlike my mother, who saw me, my father could not. The number one evil that we face is unconsciousness. And now that I am older, I understand the wisdom that was always waiting for me, so simple and so obvious but so hard to learn— His loss.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“By wanting something as vast and untamable as the ocean, I had revealed my own desire to experience the fullness of life.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Often when people get together because of sex or some animal magnetism and that wears off, they end up thinking: I don’t like this motherfucker.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“You have to dismantle the old to make the space for something new.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“…there are those seasons when the snow globe is being shaken all around you, and you’re standing in place, looking up to try to see where the scattered world is all going to fall.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Pela primeira vez na vida, entendi que magina era uma escolha deliberada, algo a ser intencionalmente criado.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Pela primeira vez na vida, entendi que magia era uma escolha deliberada, algo a ser intencionalmente criado.”
― Rupaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“to buy into the fantasy that he was good when his knee touched mine that day in the park—and I hated myself for allowing that part to run the show. It was fear that had made me cling to him, fear that I would be alone, fear that no one else would ever see me as lovable or deserving, fear that my father had been right to leave me waiting on that porch all those years earlier. I despised that fear, that human vulnerability that made me want to belong to someone else. It made me weak, and for that I was ashamed. I hated that part of myself.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“When you understand your secret girl, she can be useful to you. You can know her, this little avatar that lives within you, see what she’s made of, what her characteristics are, and understand when she needs to be revealed to the world and how. But as powerful as your secret girl can be, she’s equally dangerous when you refuse to acknowledge her—and what she needs.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Each of us is responsible for ourselves. This is an uncomfortable truth that many of us do not want to accept. We grow up wanting to believe that a benevolent force, maybe our parents, will take care of us forever. But in actuality we can only ever control ourselves. We must let go of the safety vest. Or stop looking for one. We must be all right on our own.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“When you hear your story told through someone else's mouth, you know you've arrived at the right place.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Most queer people understand the experience of growing up feeling that you are at least a little bit different.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Hollywood isn’t calling? Do it yourself. Start a band. Produce films you can star in. Design your own clothes. Write your own books. Create your own merchandise. Build your own empire. Become your own icon.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“The big lie of our lives is that we are powerless—that we need something else, like a job, or a partner, or fame, or the dopamine hijack of a hit of cocaine, or the chilly metallic weight of a gun—to grant us power. We mistake easy pleasure, or a rush of adrenaline, for power. But real power isn’t a high: It’s something else, grounded and secure. Much as we seek power in every corner of our lives, it’s always already in us; it’s impossible to be powerless if you recognize that you yourself are power. Life is power.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“What if that - that need to love - was the best thing about me?”
― RuPaul Charles, The House of Hidden Meanings

“the only way out is through.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Not long after that, the questions came: Why you? Drag had been around forever. Why had I been able to crack the code after so many false starts and almosts?
But I knew they would never understand the delicate choreography I’d done to make it all work. I’d mastered the art of naughty-lite: two spoonfuls of Diana Ross, a pinch of Cher, a shake of Dolly Parton, all sealed with Walt Disney’s family-friendliness. Before, I had been blurry—confusing, a thing that only some people could understand. Finally, I had snapped into focus, just in time for the whole world to see.
The eighties, with all its excess and opulence, had also been marred by darkness: the heaviness of crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, the crashes of S&Ls in the markets. There was a yearning for levity in the culture, the very same irreverence and sense of play that had animated me my whole life.
A window opened. I stepped through it.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Unlike my mother, who saw me, my father could not. The number one evil that we face is unconsciousness. And now that I am older, I understand the wisdom that was always waiting for me, so simple and so obvious but so hard to learn—

His loss.”
― RuPaul Charles, The House of Hidden Meanings

“Even when I didn't have a dime, I always felt rich, because I knew that I had imagination. Having money to me was like having a tank full of gas—it didn't mean much if you didn't know where you were going or didn't have the curiosity to enjoy the ride. Money made things easier—much easier. But no matter how poor I'd been, I had never felt as impoverished as the rich people I knew who had no imagination, whose capacity for fun was stunted.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir

“Sometimes the thing we are not able to let go of isn't benevolent. Sometimes we hang on to past hurts and old ideas. We refuse to let those die, that old darkness. But we have to let go - both of the things we despise and, often, the things that we love. Every ascended master will tell you the same thing: It's the ego that grips, and nonattachment is the path to freedom. But it never stops being difficult to let go - to say goodbye.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir