Quotes/passages/poems/prose/sentences that have jumped off the page for whatever reason – whether it’s relatable, humorous, antagonizing, or yet-to-be-defined. Entries are listed in chronological page order, beginning with the most recent book.
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.
pg. 1
When I was in college, the lust I felt for my professors was overwhelming. It did not matter if they were men or women, attractive or unattractive, brilliant or average, I desired them deeply. I desired them because I thought they had the power to tell me about myself. If I had a shred of brazenness, or even confidence, at the time, I’m sure I would have walked into one of their offices and thrown myself at them. I did not. But if one of them whistled, I surely would have come running.
pg. 12
There were sickly gray rings below here eyes and the drawn expression on her face made her look like a daguerreotype of a morose Progressive-Era female intellectual.
pg. 122
Guide by Dennis Cooper
It’s strange what goes on in your head when you’re attracted to someone – I mean, so turned on that your thoughts are just a twisted narration to his day-to-day life, and then by some fluke or fated twist or whatever you get the chance to fuck him whenever you want, and you start to realize that his sublimity’s just your own imaginative garbage, period, and that all you’re going to get out of him is a new set of needs, body odors, opinions, emotions, et cetera, all of which you completely recognize from your other relationships, and you start thinking, So why am I prioritizing him again?
pg. 54
Closer by Dennis Cooper
Gay is what David Bowie pretends to be when he makes records.
pg. 119
Trixie and Katya’s Guide to Modern Womanhood by Trixie Mattel and Katya
I think straight guys drink whiskey because they think that enduring a putrid brown liquid makes them seem tough. Women drink it because they want to feel like they are Carrie Underwood or some faux-western version of a cartoon cowgirl. Gays drink it because their abusive fathers drank it and it makes them feel close to their dads but not in arm’s reach.
pg # missing from notes
As a gay person, I am prone to hyperbole and high drama and will catastrophize even the slightest inconvenience to the level of global crisis. I am usually fifteen seconds away from spiraling towards suicide, as the cabin pressure of my life is permanently set to “Well, it’s over.”
pg # missing from notes
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
The smell of vegetables fermenting in a fragrant bouquet of fish sauce, garlic, ginger, and gochugaru radiated through my small Greenpoint kitchen, and I would think of how my mother always used to tell me never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t like kimchi. They’ll always smell it on you, seeping through your pores. Her very own way of saying, “You are what you eat.”
pg # missing from notes
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
“Rat race is a perfect name for it,” she said. “We’re always going and going and going, and never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that you couldn’t want anything else and then you started looking for something else to want? It seems like we’re always searching for something to satisfy us, and never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool we could.”
pg # missing from notes
Here for It (or, How to Save Your Soul in America) by R. Eric Thomas
I love Church. It’s theater, it’s high camp, it’s cabaret. What’s not to love? You get to dress up like you’re going to the Grammys. Literally every word that everyone says in Church is a very compelling story that frequently involves both scandal and magic. There is so much gossip. It’s Pay-What-You-Wish. There is a choir. And musical numbers. And choreography. And when things really get going, people yell, shout, jump up and down, and stop the show. HONEY Church is very gay.
pg. 173
Straight James / Gay James by James Franco
We send out loud messages
To ourselves,
That our world is dying:
1984, Blade Runner,
Armageddon, The Road.
I’ve yet to read a book,
Or watch a film about a future
I’d like to live in.
pg. 24
Consumed by David Cronenberg
But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, it seems, that we construct meaning where there are none.
pg. 227
Supermarket by Bobby Hall
“I mean, you’re twenty-four, for fuck’s sake, and you live with your mother! You don’t have a job, Flynn!
“I write.”
“You write? Ha, is that some sick joke?! Flynn, stop it. You aren’t an author. You’ve never even finished a book. You send half-baked, unfinished ideas to publishers, expecting book deals. What’s wrong with you? It doesn’t work that way! I mean, why do you think every company you send your ideas to replies with the same letter? Every time reiterating what I have been saying for years – ‘great promise but finish the damn thing!’ You can’t even keep a literary agent. They all drop you because you never deliver. […]”
pg. 35
Fuck the literary world.
(the entire page)
pg. 70
(halfway down)
pg. 86
Chameleon in an Candy Store by Anonymous
Her ridiculously handsome father was a geologist and so, it could be said, was her privately educated sister, being as she was a professional gold digger.
pg. 17
I like the idea of the lamb skin condom because as an Irishman it satisfies my desire to shag sheep and women at the same time.
pg. 52
She knew how to adapt to her surroundings, that’s for sure. This was the classic behavior of abused children. Broken people learn how to keep the peace at the expense of our own needs. We merged into any given situation.
pg. 95
Diary of an Oxygen Thief by Anonymous
Romance killed more people than cancer. Okay, maybe not killed, but dulled more lives. Removed more hope, sold more medication, caused more tears.
pg. 16
This is my therapy. I’m too fucked up to go and see a therapist, and to be honest, I wouldn’t trust him anyway, would I? I mean, it’s not as if my paranoia is going to clock off for an hour a week.
pg. 51
[…] and somehow during that period I was able to do a decent impersonation of myself. You’d think it would have been easier considering I’d been my own understudy for years.
pg. 52
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Spirit rules secretly alone the body achieves nothing
is something you know
instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head at sixteen.
pg. 46
What is time made of? Geryon said suddenly
turning to the yellowbeard who
looked at him surprised. Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction.
Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
pg. 90
The effort it took to pull himself away from Herakles’s eyes
could have been measured on the scale devised by Richter. Call us
we’re at the City Hotel, said Herakles.
The Richter scale has neither a minimum nor a maximum threshold.
Everything depends on the sensitivity of the seismograph.
pg. 110
Nepantla: An Anthology – Queer Poets of Color edited by Christopher Soto
3. If Brian is traveling at 71 miles per hour & Ryan is traveling at 74 miles per hour & a dog is barking at another dog for 7 dog minutes, when would be the best time for me to visit you?
pg. 24
Migration:
The first time someone called me a terrorist
My knees shook legs
I was ten years old and it was winter in New Brunswick
The second time someone called me a terrorist
My face burned
I was eleven years old and it was summer in Alberta
The third time:
I broke his nose
Listen:
Ma told me that some people are softer than others
And some people are knives.
pg. 80
One Million Pages 