Boy Erased Quotes

“Love, over time, could either blossom or wither, become a source of wonder or a remembered ache.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“You cut out what was once dear to you, ignore the ache in the back of your throat, erase the details you want to forget.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“What my mother didn’t yet know about being gay in the South was that you never ran out of material, that being secretly gay your whole life, averting your eyes every time you saw a handsome man, praying on your knees every time a sexual thought entered your mind or every time you’d acted even remotely feminine—this gave you an embarrassment of sins for which you constantly felt the need to apologize, repent, beg forgiveness.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir

“But love was always moving, always pushing us forward—always in action—and we often had no choice but to submit to where it lead us.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“With each passing day at the facility, it seemed as though becoming straight was simply a matter of good lighting, of ignoring what you didn’t want to see.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“Sometimes it was what you left unsaid or undone that drew you into a state of wonder.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“There is a mystery in this, a minor apocalypse somewhere between what these two men once knew of themselves- a holding on to something that, in turn, refused to let them go- and I long to know it, like the old prophets.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“What did it feel like to not have to think about your every move, to not be scrutinized for everything you did, to not have to lie every day?”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“When I first read the Harry Potter books and learned about the lightning bolt scar on Harry's forehead, I thought, Of course. Of course love worked that way. Of course it left its mark on the beloved. This secret mark protected you, kept you safe from harm, reminded you of who you were. All it took was the smallest symbol and you were safe. As I grew older and discovered my love of literature, I externalized the markings, wrote them down in my Moleskine, kept my notebook close - so much so that when the LIA counselors took away my notebook years later, they took away much of this protection. But they didn't take all of it. The empty pages still carried ghosts.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“This affliction is what makes me smarter. This disadvantage is what gives me my ambition.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“LIA was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. But the means to that end—self-loathing, suicidal ideation, years of false starts—could make you feel lonelier, and less like yourself, than you’d ever felt in your life.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family

“Trauma has made dark what was once painfully clear”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“Naming something beautiful made it so. I'd seen this in the way the church spoke of marriage as a sacred institution and in the one man plus one woman bumper stickers people sported on their vehicles. The same ones my father would hand to any customer passing through his dealership service department.

Naming something ugly had a similar effect. The sound of my mother's vomiting the night she drove me home had taught me this lesson better than anything else ever had. I was gay, had been named as such, a fact that once ingested had to be immediately expelled.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“Masculine meant strong. Masculine meant straight. If we could only learn the essence of what it meant to be masculine, then we could learn the rest.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“That night, I made the quiet decision to agree to whatever they had in mind, the shame and rage settling in my chest, filling up spaces I had previously reserved for love, spreading beneath my skin like invisible bruises. Unlike my mother, I had no way of purging myself, no way of staring into my watery reflection and obliterating my features with sick.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“I wondered what it felt like to see yourself reflected in every movie, to have friends and family constantly dropping fun little hints about your love life, to have a world open up to you in all its magnificence. What did it feel like to not have to think about your every move, to not be scrutinized for everything you did, to not have to lie everyday? I told myself that it must have felt really dull to be straight. This affliction is what makes me smarter. This disadvantage is what gives me my ambition. This is what first inspired me to write.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“What my mother didn’t yet know about being gay in the South was that you never ran out of material, that being secretly gay your whole life, averting your eyes every time you saw a handsome man, praying on your knees every time a sexual thought entered your mind or every time you’d acted even remotely feminine—this gave you an embarrassment of sins for which you constantly felt the need to apologize, repent, beg forgiveness. I could never count the number of times I’d sinned against God. If I wanted, I could fill out a new MI every night for the rest of my life.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir

“Many of the other hundred or so denominations that comprised the Baptist spectrum often quibbled about what could or could not be permitted within the flock, with some churches taking these issues more seriously than others, subjects like the ethics of dancing and the pitfalls of non-Biblical reading still up for discussion. “Harry Potter is nothing more than a seducer of children’s souls,” a visiting Baptist preacher once told our family’s church. I had no doubt that my LIA counselors would also shun any mention of Harry Potter, that my time spent in Hogwarts would have to remain a private pleasure, and that I had entered into an even more serious pact with God by coming here, one that required me to abolish most of what had come before LIA. Before entering this room, I had been told to cast aside everything but my Bible and my handbook.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir

“If I didn't say too much, if people didn't notice me, then I might also escape God's roving Sauron eye.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“It seemed one talisman had activated the other: Mark’s number taught me that there were secret loves crouched and waiting in the last place you would likely go searching for them. What was Jesus’s compassion anyway but some well-crafted graffiti on the corridors of history, an invitation to follow Him into the most unlikely places? Love could come to you even in a room that seemed drained of it.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family

“The chorus of voices will grow each year, revealing decades of pain, decades lost, families torn apart, relationships ruined because people outside the ex-gay world can never understand what we patients went through”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“Cutting away my roots and the people I loved would transform me into a shell of the person I once was, an automaton stripped of all its gears.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased

“I never expected my father to accept every shifting detail of my life overnight, nor I his. Our moments of misunderstanding, though often damaging, were still far from abusive.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“She will stand in the middle of that field if that is what it takes for me to notice her pain, refuse to budge even as the fire draws closer. She will wait for my father to join her.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“I wondered what it felt like to see yourself reflected in every movie, to have friends and family constantly dropping fun little hints about your love life, to have the world open up to you in all its magnificence.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“I wondered what it felt like to see yourself reflected in every movie, to have friends and family constantly dropping fun little hints about your love life, to have a world open up to you in all its magnificence. What did it feel like to not have to think about your every move, to not be scrutinized for everything you did, to not have to lie everyday?... I told myself that it must have felt really dull to be straight... This affliction is what makes me smarter. This disadvantage is what gives me my ambition. This is what first inspired me to write.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“If I could have done it myself, I would have already done it: pried open my ribs and etched the Word onto my heart’s beating chambers. But it seemed my ex-gay counselors were the only ones with enough skill and experience to wield the scalpel.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

“Love could come to you even in a room that seemed drained of it.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir

“Often, it felt like a small victory to realize that another point of contact had lost its hold on me. I was in control of how quickly I lost the weight, and it felt good not only to feel the past leaving my body—all that fat like rings of a trunk now narrowing, disappearing—but also to see the shock on people’s faces, the lack of recognition at first glance, the double take. I was a different boy.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir

“His idol was Billy Graham, an evangelist who used the public sphere to such an advantage that he had been able to shape our country’s political climate by whispering into the ears of no less than eleven presidents.”
― Garrard Conley, Boy Erased: A Memoir