Open, Heaven Quotes

“Perhaps I was so steeped in love, had woven its mythologies through my mind for so long, that when it arrived in reality I could not recognise it. Love confused me, bewildered me, tore me apart, but not because it was not love, but because I thought it was a fake, some unreal version that did not accord with the love I had dreamt alone.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“It was like walking through a folk song that afternoon — the blackbirds and the thrushes, the sweetness of the flowers, the boy I loved, and who might even love me, waiting for me between the trees.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“I had come to find love, its vision, its company, to be changed by it... knowing that it would deplete me as much as it sustained, that it would torture me as much as it made life... worth living.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“It was a paradox, really – I was afraid of men, but I only felt really safe if one of them was on my side.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“This is what I wanted - this independence - but when it was given to me, I felt isolated and cast out, riddled with guilt. It was one of those strange contradictions: I wanted to be on my own, but the moment I was on my own, I wanted to be called back.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“As I watched them around school, I saw that all their bravado, their crudeness, sometimes their violence, dissipated when they were alone. That was the thing that broke my heart, that made them so perfect to me. I saw that they were soft, and this softness made my heart sore, because I knew it was a private thing, an intimate thing that only showed itself when they were unwatched, when they felt safe. Their tenderness was a world I was locked out of, and all I wanted was to be let inside.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“i'm scared that i'll always need someone. i'm not afraid of being alone, i'm afraid that i can't be myself when i'm alone.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“I had never been able to find words for most of the things I felt. I just let them pass through and over me. The problem was that I spent so much time alone that, when the time came for speaking, I had very little practice.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“What was I hoping to find? Yes, the layout was the same, but as I moved through the house, that sense of time’s irrecoverable passage returned – the rooms repeating an absence, a constant reminder that I could never return, that it was all over and had been for years.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“Δεν υπήρχε πόνος που δεν μπορούσαμε να προκαλέσουμε ο ένας στον άλλο, γιατί δεν υπήρχε ούτε μια γωνιά που να μην είχε φωτιστεί από την αγάπη μας.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“Perhaps I was so steeped in love, woven its mythologies through my mind for so long, that when it arrived in reality I could not recognize it.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven

“[I] felt abject in my hiddenness, my shadow-life, and because I had spent so long just watching, never acting, I was terrified of exposing my desire. I thought it would be shocking, that it would tear right through the fabric of the world and everyone would see it and know me and everyone would know that I was not a harmless thing, an undesiring thing, but that I had a fire insurgent within me, a buried fire that had been stoked furiously for so long that it would rage through the world if for a moment I let it out.”
― Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven