The Lookback Window Quotes

“There's a chance my present has ceased. If that's the case—if I'm gone—I had two hopes: to map a way of healing form a form of violence I never totally understood, if it's understandable at all, and to provide a guide on how a person in the present of their lives might speak the unspeakable. Language failed me for many years. All I did was run and scream. That might be my legacy, too.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“I sometimes wish I could hate a place as easily as other people instead of hating the people themselves.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“Some people talk about their PTSD as if it's a badge of honor, and I roll my fucking eyes. I'm not trying to be the PDST-esy of them all. I ignored it for a really long time. I overdosed at seventeen. I had no home for a little while. Every night I have nightmares. It's gonna end my marriage, too. I want it to end. He can't stomach my suffering and hates that he can't help me and doesn't want to do what will actually end this era. I think he loves me too much to see me in pain, and the pain he does see reminds him of his own, which is just as fucked as mine. Why can't just fucking let me cry? When the men came over, they would drug me, and I still crave those drugs to this day. Every man I look at either reminds me if those men or they don't. All men are mirrors. Whether they want to be or not. I think about those men all the time. (117)”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“The great shame of your life is that you weren't raised Catholic," James said to me. "You've got suffering, but you don't have the aesthetic.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“The more a person knew what happened to you the more they knew what they could get away with doing to you.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“I was somewhere in the future, granting myself resolve I did not yet believe myself to have; I was hoping someday this day might be useful to a person I wasn't yet.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“The only way you survived was to keep what you loved secret. Otherwise, you might soon be handcuffed in the dark.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“Like I've said before, sometimes I doubted I was alive, and now I was renting a belief in my own humanity, mustering a brief importance I needed to defend, in order to walk across the street right into the offices and demand what I deserved.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“A breeze was promising fall, even though fall had already come”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“...we continued to make out, like teenagers, like boys who had never been raped, like men who had once been—you know what I mean.”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“But I'm trying to talk to the adult Dylan who escaped and saved his own life. You are free. Even now, the door is unlocked, and if you want to leave you can leave. Do you hear me?”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window

“..the pain of being was unimaginable and yet here they were—imagined”
― Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window