Queer Quotes
69 quotes
"They'll say you are bador perhaps you are mador at least you should stay undercover.Your mind must be bareif you would dareto think you can love more than one lover."
"But in the midst of this decaying, burning city, there are pockets of hope. It can be found in the tiny dark rooms in underground bars, where women with short hair cheer on men in dresses. It can be felt in abandoned cinemas where anonymous strangers fall in love if only for a few moments, and in the living rooms where families crowd around, drinking sweet black tea and Skyping their homesick relatives so that together they can watch the long, rambling talk shows that go on all night."
"You have some queer friends, Dorothy,' she said.The queerness doesn't matter, so long as they're friends,' was the answer"
"If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body."
"You look like a lesbian artist fairy."
"I have come to realize that in life and politics, there is always more to take into consideration."
"Glitter family is my long-time favourite term for this: the people who those of us pushed to society’s margins (and beyond) make our cohort. Glitter is known to be shiny and unruly, easy to get and hard to be rid of. I love the drag connotations and the femme visibility of it, as well as its unmistakably queer sensibility—look only as far as glitter-bombing for proof that nothing is as thoroughly and satisfyingly queer as glitter."
"It's okay to feel bad about how things went down, but it's not okay to drown in guilt and regret every day for having made decisions other people don't agree with. At some point, we all have to man up and decide to do what we have to do, despite the people around us who try to get in the way."
"My mom's like me and she doesn't want to look weak in front of other people. And she's like Colby in the way that she has to take hits at other people whenever she feels threatened. That used to make me want to cave and do what she wants. But it doesn't anymore."
"Not to do as the child wishes would be wrong because he is born on a path, and it would be evil, a crime against nature to make him deny his spirit."
"How many of these children would one day be queer? How many would be felled by the acronym? How many by something else? How many would forget the circus? How many would never see it at all? How many would join?"
"Sometimes it feels like my queerness was always there but I was too shell-shocked and splintered by violence to see it. When I finally did? It saved me. Opening up to my queerness saved me. Once I began to identify as queer, I began to require this dreaming and commitment to change from my partners. I define myself to claim myself, to foster a curated community of support"
Jennifer Patterson, Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement
"I can line up these moments of violence, precariously as dominoes. Sometimes I worry they will all fall; knocking each other down, knocking me down. Sometimes they do. Violence left me hollow. It left me enraged. It left me desperately needing to leave a body I couldn't trust. But most frustrating of all, violence left me too wounded to claim the space I needed in order to find fulfillment in the arms, heart, and body of a queer relationship."
Jennifer Patterson, Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement
"I was finished with assuming the best intentions of those who abandoned me, done trying to assuage my loneliness in barren places."
"I'm more a collector of identities and words that feel right to me. To me this is an inarguable point. I am who I say I am and that's not up for debate."
"It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different."
"When a man does a queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder"
"Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting."
"the whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside."
"The pending brahpocalypse/ coup d'état - whatever it was - was much more important than whether a donut-eating Police Officer saw a flying saucer over a gay club or not." - Red Gods Sing."
"When straight-identified women have sex with women, the broader culture waits in anticipation for them to return to what is likely their natural, heterosexual state; when straight-identified men have sex with men, the culture waits in anticipation for them to admit that they are gay."
"I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles."
"We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning."
"By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were....Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't."
"Our creed [atheism] is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't."
"You could cut...all that"
"A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out."
"That’s the vicious truth doctor. For me and persons like me, we are experiencing a divorce from our own individual self by sensing our sensations, emotions, behaviors as not belonging to the same person or identity. That’s how you psychiatrists could explain it. That’s how society would like to codify its population. Such a ludicrous model we’ve been creating calling it civilization"
"When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience - with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions - completely off the hook. - Scott Turner Schofield"
"I am not here to entertain straight people."
"There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass."
"Why, oh why, must we always go through pigs to get our truffles?"
James St. James, Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland
"Living with stress and secrets is both stressful and secretive."
"The eye of youth is very observant. Youth has its moments of keen intuition, even normal youth -- but the intuition of those who stand mi-way between the sexes is so ruthless, so poignant, so deadly, as to be in the nature of an added scourge..."
"You can stop waiting, you know,' she says. 'For what?' 'For God to strike you down."
"Maybe I grew up too fast, maybe that's my trouble. I feel so lost out here...hung up between two worlds; half-kid and half-adult, half-boy and half-girl. And sometimes it seems like I get the dirty side of both."
"I hate that word. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: 'Do you think she's straight?' 'Oh no. She's scenic"
"The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous."
"What happened was private. I was in it with Rose. She had hurt me grievously and now I was forever attached. I was in it now with all the women in the world. I walked home glad. I will die, I thought with a bounce in my step. I'm whole. Not whole like anyone else, but whole like me. Painful, but simple. It was very simple now."
"The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged."
"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind usis a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another"
"What I love about being queer is... Everything. I like that it makes me different, and I like that it makes people uncomfortable sometimes. I like that it makes people ask me lots of questions about things they probably would not normally ask people about their relationships or lifestyles. And most of all I love being queer because i get to have a girlfriend."
"I find myself making excuses for this kind of bullying behavior. Not everyone has been to college, learned trans 101, studied queer theory... But this is unfair to myself and other trans people. I've come to realize that understanding me isn't a matter of being an intellectual. Likewise, one doesn't have to be a radical to respect my feelings. Decent people consider how their comments affect others."
"Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift."
"All monsters are queers. Who is able to bring the dead back to life? God and the Devil. The Devil makes dead men into monsters: immortal, immoral—and queer."
"Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about the false images, devastating lies, untold violence. Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world."
Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
"As a lesbian I have no face, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races."
"What was the point of being himself if he had to be alone?"
"When he appeared before the lord, his lordship was smitten immediately with the boy's unadorned beauty, like a first glimpse of the moon rising above a distant mountain. The boy's hair gleamed like the feathers of a raven perched silently on a tree, and his eyes were lovely as lotus flowers. One by one his other qualities became apparent, from his nightingale voice to his gentle disposition, as obedient and true as a plum blossom."
"Harper: You, the one part ofthe real world I wasn't allergic to."
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