Borrowed Time Quotes

“Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slanted yellow light.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Grief is a sword, or it is nothing.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slant of yellow light.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“I suppose we’d been waiting for each other all our lives.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“We were doing the best we could with what we had left, and more and more it was like Diogenes tossing away the tin cup because he could drink with his hands. It turns out there is no end to learning what you can do without.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Though gay men have begun to understand it is something in themselves these upright men so fear, too many of us have internalized their self-hatred as shame. That the flesh and the spirit are one in love is none of the business of the celibate men of God, especially those who believe they rule the province of love. But the mission of the homophobe is more pernicious even than his morality. He wants every one of us to be all alone, never to find the beloved friend.
A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods’ own fury of luck to get two people to meet. But when it finally happens, two men in love can’t rejoice out loud—joy of the very thing everyone burns for—without bracing for the rant of prophets, the schoolyard bully, and Rome’s “intrinsic evil.” I try to remember that we fight as a ragged people to outlast the calamity so that others can sleep as safe as my friend and I, like a raft in the tempest.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“If later on, as we read this, we might think “How happy we were then!” at least we’ll have that. That as we lived them, these moments, we knew they were important, and that’s all there is.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“When Larry Kramer tells Mathilde Krim in Interview about the closeted gay man at the National Institutes of Health who buried the AIDS data for two years, that’s when I understand how doomed we were before we ever knew. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“a body on the sand. My journal gets very spotty here, with only a single detailed entry”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Bernice sat in the chair by the window day after day, knitting a pearl-white sweater for Rog, a sweater she later admitted to me she didn't care if he ever wore or liked; she was knitting to keep him alive.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“unpossessive. Before his parents left, Al once again paid him the highest compliment about his relationship with me. “You boys are the best friends I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You’re like Damon and Pythias.” It’s a long way for a man to come who couldn’t look me in the face for a year after Roger finally told him he was gay. A century”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Some of the agonies that burn in the heart forever begin as brief as snapshots.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute. The media are convinced in 1987 that they’re doing a great job reporting the AIDS story, and there’s no denying they’ve grasped the horror. But for four years they let the bureaucracies get away with passive genocide,”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“If the government was going to continue to act as if we didn’t exist, if the medical establishment was prone to gridlock over funds, if the drug companies were waiting till the curve got high enough for profit, then we would find our own way.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“I knew we must stay in absolute sync, for the enemy had grown so subtle, its camouflage so chameleon, we had to be on constant watch.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Fate was the issue, if anything; not guilt.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Perhaps we were atheists by default, but the matter of God did not come into the equation of our love.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“I must’ve gone out for dinner with Al and Bernice, and I must’ve been full of reassurance and interstitial data. All the blood work was normal so far, but I don’t recall if an actual T-cell test was taken, or if we knew the results before the verdict. The T cells are a subset of the white blood count. Infection with the”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“the tenth floor of the medical center from a dozen others. Amateurs still at the system, I expect we appeared like two meek refugees, with the overnight bag and a briefcase full of work. The tenth floor at UCLA is called the”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“How far was that? On March 1 he told us the chest x-ray looked clear, except for a shadow that was probably the pulmonary artery, but he was playing safe and ordering a CAT scan to make sure it wasn’t a lymph node. Roger and I had lunch that day at the hospital cafeteria, in the prison-yard court on plastic chairs under a lowering sky. Roger said how glad he”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“walking with on Robertson was an outing of the self-destructed, trying to make do with one day at a time.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“Wouldn't you like right now to last forever?' Roger said as we lolled on the picnic slope. The afterglow of it lasted for days, for we bragged about it as if we'd just ascended K-2.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“That Socrates was unpretentious almost to a fault, never believing wisdom was his alone or made him superior, but that everyone possessed it if one could only talk it out.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“I want the two million—or the five million, depending on whose scenario piques your fancy—to have themselves tested and know, so I will have people to talk to. Because after midnight and during weekends I cannot talk to those who play at business as usual.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“I want the two million—or the five million, depending on whose scenario piques your fancy—to have themselves tested and know, so I will have people to talk to. Because after midnight and during weekends”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“A man ought to be free to find his reason. Not that freedom alone will serve it up: it requires the gods’ own fury of luck to get two people to meet.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir

“That the flesh and the spirit are one in love is none of the business of the celibate men of God, especially those who believe they rule the province of love.”
― Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir