The Gospel of Winter Quotes

“The problem is that you don't always get to write your own story. You get written into some stories, and if ask why, there isn't an answer. You don't have any control, because the forces at work are too large to confront, and sometimes too large even to understand.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“Fuck hope and despair. We live in a world of consequence and effect.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“But is that really compassion—to extend oneself to others with the assumption that that act will be rewarded? Isn’t the greater leap of faith the act of compassion in the face of nothingness? But who would do that? Who wouldn’t act solely in ways that are best for him or her when the veil has been thrown off and words like love and virtue are left naked in their hypocrisy?”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“There are times when we all want to tell ourselves, Look at that misfortune over there; thank God that isn’t happening here, to us, to me. You can ignore the bombs and the violence across the ocean until buildings are crumbling in your own country; you can dismiss the gossip about the neighbors across town as melodramatic, until those fists and the screams you’d heard about come barreling into your own home. Then what do you do?”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“So many times I had sought out his voice, listened to it with an eagerness, hope, and desire that I had called love, and still now, that thing that tugged me toward him must have been something like love, or what love leaves in its wake when it is gone.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“It was my hope for all of us that we’d each have someone again soon, someone to cling to, however briefly, to remind ourselves we were alive.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“When you drink alone over a long period of time, you’re not deluding yourself into thinking you’re clearheaded and bright. You’re falling apart, you know it, and you just want to slip away, numb as a snowman, melting until you’re gone.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“Nobody ever said I don’t know or I’m afraid, and they acted like the masks they wore were their real faces and that they could sustain themselves forever on their own self-assurance—like they really believed they didn’t need anybody else. What was that John Donne poem we’d read in Weinstein’s class, “No Man Is An Island”? Not here. We were a goddamn social archipelago that called itself a community. Why did I feel like I was the only one who lived in a nightmare?”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“I wondered if it didn’t all come down to something simpler: Are you the kind of person who is there for people when they need you, or not? Isn’t it in those moments when you have to work harder than you thought you could to reach out to another person, and you do, that you finally find the you who’s been hiding behind the mask all that time? Is it there, finally truly naked, and reaching for one another, that we create the chance to hold one another again? And what about the chance to love again? Do we get to create that possibility too?”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“I didn’t want to think about sex—that could come later. All I wanted now was companionship. That was the real freedom. That was the only safety we could offer each other: what it really meant to love and live without a mask.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“She held me, not like a lover but in a way we should all be held at least once in our lives—in a way that lets us know we are not alone. A human absolution.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“[...] I thought about how a belief really begins. It doesn’t hit you like a lightning bolt, smack you off your horse, and fill you with visions of a world tinted with more vibrant colors. Instead, it begins with a desire to see something in that certain light, or to see the world in a certain way. The desire paves the way. It makes you believe the clouds are parting—and parting specifically for you. You need them to, because their doing so, just for you, gives you some incentive, some inspiration to keep going.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“I’ve always assumed other people have better ideas, that they do know what is best for me. It never occurred to me that they’re all just like me—they’re all pretending too. We’re all completely on our own.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“I feel like I’ve spent my whole life trying to please other people, trying to become who they want me to be, but it’s not like I have any other ideas. It’s not like they’re stopping me from being the someone I want to be. There is no someone I want to be—isn’t that weird?”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“Isn’t it crazy to keep walking back in time and asking yourself to correct this choice and that choice? You could probably walk yourself all the way back to the beginning and say, Fuck it, why get involved with this mess in the first place—look what’s ahead?”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“I had to believe that when our bodies came together, it was a bridge to something deeper and more meaningful, a conjoining of parts to make a fuller whole, just as a breath is not only an inhale and an exhale but one act in which they complete each other. That was all I wanted: a sense of stability, of completeness, an assurance that any fear could be dissolved, that loneliness wasn’t a sickness cured when someone else’s exhale became my inhale and, together, neither of us could ever feel alone.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“Mother always found the loose stitch that could reduce a priceless carpet to a pile of threads.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter

“But it was just me and the silence around me, and in that nothingness, I was afraid. I was terrified of other people and of my own damn self, and my fears were overwhelming, closing in on me like something near and breathing. Without my chemical surges, I didn’t know how I would stay focused and move beyond those fears.”
― Brendan Kiely, The Gospel of Winter