Dead Collections Quotes

“...any reasonable person would want to be a librarian.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“There’s wanting to be a guy,” I said. “And there’s not wanting to be a woman. And there’s actually feeling yourself to be a guy, or someone who’s not a woman. They’re all really different, and complicated. Especially when you feel yourself to be a guy, but don’t want to be one. Or when you feel yourself to be one, but you don’t know it, and you don’t even know why you always feel like you’re pretending.” “Which one were you?” “I was the last one. Of course.” “I can’t even imagine what it’s like,” she said. “I used to want so much not to be a woman. But I can’t imagine not being one.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Those names, Ari and Sol - what is it about Jewish trans men that we all have to reach back to our roots, as if they are the only source of nourishment we have left?”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Getting older is the most goth thing of all.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“It's cold in the archives, and there's nobody there. I belong in the archives. I am cold too.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Not that I was ever really an adolescent, but I had the tenderness of one. That’s what it’s like to be a trans child and not know it. You have all the fragility of adolescence, but none of its resilience, the clever cartilage that always grows back.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Every object in the world in the world is formed of molecules that have come together by human intention, and now the intention was gone, and the objects were losing their shape.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“It often feels to me as if I need to make every decision very carefully or I’ll get on the wrong path and it will be impossible to work my way back again. Different paths of light streaking off into the distance, but each one is only one, and if I take one, all the others will go out.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“I think you are my last lover. It is so strange that in our lives of searching for love, if we’re monogamous, we are de facto looking for our last lover—the person we’ll have our last orgasm with. We want to know how our lives will turn out, we want to know the ending and we use love’s augury to do that—we tell our future in our lover’s entrails.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“It's not weird to make your body yours. It's not weird to want a custom body.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“I have tried to live by making work my life. It has made me step on people - in small and big ways - who just use work as work, and I’ve tried to valorize it, as if I care more about the archives than other people do.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“I’d never been in love either, except with television.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“After the episode was over, I just sat in the dark. The thing was that the episode still had me. You’d expect an old fandom like that, whose purpose was spent, would spill from my mouth like ashes, but it didn’t. Watching those men look at each other, I felt the same longing and fear as I had at fifteen, when my whole life was longing and fear. The difference between me and most teenagers was that I didn’t know what I longed for, and I sure didn’t know what I was afraid of.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“Not that there wasn’t real shame in what you did, but can’t you see that there’s some amount of grace in the world, some amount of forgiveness for people who want something that’s strange, but that they are given permission to take?”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“It’s been so long since I’ve loved a person. I’m not sure if I ever have. I’m not sure if I even loved my mother, when I was little, the way I love you. You are so hot and fierce and strange. … I don’t know if it will ever make sense for us to live together, for us to make anything together, but I know it will always make sense for me to know you. And that is a comfort, that is a great ship upon which I can rest on the waters.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections

“And they talk like drunks," said Elsie. "Very correct, trying very hard to seem normal. Obviously the mind is there but you're being so careful that you sound like a broken robot.”
― Isaac Fellman, Dead Collections