The Lava in My Bones Quotes

“I surrender to the Monster. What pleasure at last to give way to the strongest force in oneself.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Wind is what happens when air falls in love with itself.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“But once you describe something, you destroy it.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“The ridiculous is closer to life’s source than the sensible.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Bodies like this give sexual desire its meaning! It’s for this that penises rise like drawbridges and vaginas become engorged with blood! It’s for this that people throw snot-nosed kids into ravines, cross raging rivers, or ice-pick up the wrong side of frozen waterfalls! It’s for this that politicians undo their flies in election season, porn magazines with their pages stuck together are found stacked in church basements, people chop off body parts and mail them to ex-lovers, risk hair on palms, stolen wallets, planes flying into buildings, and lice that hop like chess figurines on a board whose players are ever changing.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“There should be a connection between a man’s hairstyle and what matters to him in life.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“If this were a fairy tale, that meant the dragon had been slain. Or hadn’t arrived yet.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Again Sam’s genitals became rock, and this astonished him as much as anything. Through Franz, he was becoming the stone Earth; the final border separating him from the planet was disappearing. And this transformation to rock was fuelled by desire, the most ephemeral thing on Earth.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“He didn’t realise that all bodies – men’s and women’s – are fragile and must be handled gently so as not to hurt the people living inside them.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“This man of his, yes, this man. Now Sam accepts his own desire. “I’m a gayrod,” he shouts marching through crowded plazas. “I’m in love with a man, and I want men. That’s what I want. I want man, man, man!”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Sam believes now that people repeatedly collide with each other swiftly, brutally – not to produce children but to shatter their sense of self, and be thrust into a creative space beyond reason, where anything can happen. Only through the destruction of psychological borders is freedom possible.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“In the evenings, Sam performs exercises to prepare his body for love-making with Franz. He practices kissing (something he’d once hated) by smooching deer lips, antelope ears, frog anuses, and the great, whiskered muzzles of sleeping bison. He improves his petting skills by necking with juniper bushes and pine tree trunks with such passion that the bark snaps and sap runs, or with such tenderness that the whole forest goes silent and swallows nest in his hair.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“I am not the wicked stepmother in this fairy’s tale.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, you know that?”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Sarcasm is the language of people whose emotions are dying.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Rocks are more co-operative than people.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“The fairy tale about the people who freely detach and re-attach appendages still inspires Sam. He remembers the character who interchanged his earlobes and testicles so he could acutely hear his ejaculations and enjoy a tightening at the side of his head whenever the weather got cold.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“As a man I’d been a cool customer. As a woman I was a hot tamale.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Der, die, das, dem, den, des. German’s six ways of saying ‘the’, like six sexual positions you never knew existed. Hey, I just sprung a boner.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“I shall listen to my heart and it shall save me. I shall listen to my heart and I’ll be free.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Although you can not hear my thoughts, Sam, I imagine I’m talking to you. Prayers to the brother who abandoned me. The day after you left Labrador, my honey started flowing. Is my body weeping for your loss?”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“Penises, toe knuckles, bellybuttons, vaginas. Sam felt the expansiveness of his own desires as he sensed, stretching away on all sides of him, an endless forest of jutting elbows, erect penises, stiff nostril hairs, clitoral flaps, quivering eyelids, testicles round as ice cream scoops, and pert feisty nipples – a wonderful wilderness he could get lost in and explore for the rest of his life.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“The breach between the mind and body can’t be healed by more knowledge.”
“Then we’ll go shopping. It’s the only way to solve a crisis.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones

“In our lifetimes, we can only know a small portion of what exists. The world is endless and its treasures are inexhaustible.”
― Barry Webster, The Lava in My Bones