Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl Quotes

“When women cover songs by men, they don’t swap the pronouns. Is this a.) a lack of anxiety about convention, b.) a biologically essential fluidity native to humans with vaginas and/or two X chromosomes, c.) rampant queerness among women singers, or d.) the universal male default?”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Paul liked to pick out the secretly cool people, people too cool to flash their coolness. The cool people were not always or even usually the same as the shiny people. Often someone shiny was too conventionally good-looking to be cool but they were still compelling, in terms of sheer wattage. Paul knew he wasn't good-looking enough to be shiny, but he could be cool in certain contexts. Cool was relational and conceptual; cool took work, cool was a meritocracy which, with all its flaws, he still preferred to the aristocracy of genetics.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“People saw what they wanted to see and wanted to see what they expected to see”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Heterosexuality=marriage=death,”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“It was June, and like everyone else Paul made himself extremely busy going to queer art openings and queer punk shows and queer spoken word showcases and queer evenings of performance art. He was exhausted and broke from being so queer...”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Pretty girl privilege, he thought. He'd heard of it and tonight he was going to test it out.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“He was glad to be a known homosexual—it allowed him a daring way with girls.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Rain beat down romantically against the windows.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Everything Paul knew boiled down to this one gimmick: try for what you want.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“He was the girl he wanted to fuck.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Paul felt an incisive critique of capitalism coming on and ordered an expensive latte as a distraction. When he tried to pay for the latte, the counter girl waved his money away. This, though Paul, buoyed, will be my city. He left the full price of the drink in the tip jar, $91 left in his pocket.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“They looked at each other with impossible-to-hide giddiness. Paul understood the expression "to throw oneself at someone.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Inside Paul something tight released: a rusted nut turned finally around its old bolt. White sheets were thrown off moldering couches with a fanfare of dust and sunlight.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“People said you could get lost in California, never come back to reality; people warned about lotus-eating. Paul thought maybe he didn't mind so much. He could stay here forever, and time would stop, and he wouldn't have to choose anything.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Paul chafed at this second coming out, at being in again at all, and so suddenly. Is it endless? he thought, like Russian nesting dolls, with no tiny solid center?”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Paul thought about straight people occasionally, not that he personally knew very many people he could really call straight. Straight culture, he guessed he meant. Movies, books, songs - especially songs - tv shows too, he surmised, not that he watched tv, except for X-Files, which at least switched up the butch/femme dynamic. Men and women alike confounded Paul, they were so rulebound. Straight people seemed confused by each other, so anxious to find camaraderie within their gender, so startled by differences between their bodies, always pinny explanations for the inevitable gulf between humans on chromosomes.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“and that was art and so didn't count”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Paul chafed at this second coming out, at being in<\i> again at all, and so suddenly. Is it endless? he thought, like Russian nesting dolls, with no tiny solid center?”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Meanwhile, Kostas left Paul's mother after 17 years. She stayed in Troy with Paul's little brother, Ari, and Kostas moved home to Des Moines. He had gotten a new job as a bookkeeper for a construction business and quietly moved in with his high school sweetheart with whom he had apparently been exchanging letters this whole time. Paul was more offended by the sentimentality of it all more than the cheating; by Kostas' low expectations of life. How could he be in love with someone he met in high school? To Paul, that was prison romance; desire that doesn't hold up to competition.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“In the elevator Paul just as often imagined the hand-holding, the running down the rainy streets with, his hot palm on the striped shoulder of some boy, the being cruised, the reading Proust to, the picnicking, the kissing, the eating takeout, the spending the day in a borrowed bed- not that anyone needed to know that.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“He'd go alone, be a spy, finally see what normal straight people did when no one was watching.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“Outside the town was quiet and white. Like the whole state, Paul thought.”
― Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl