Michael Nava Quotes

Larry was in his study, going through a pile of papers. Watching him, it occurred to me that I hardly knew him at all. It was as if all these years I'd been seeing him in profile and now that he turned his face to me, it was the face of a stranger.

He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries.

The emergence of an openly gay and lesbian population is simply the latest stage of the evolution of individual liberty, and a reaffirmation of American tradition. Gay men and women don't come out because it's fashionable, popular, easy, safe, mandatory, or conventional; they do it to be true to themselves.

What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be.

[Josh Mandel] "Most things people care about are silly. They don't think about the ones that matter."

It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown.

[Irene Gentry] "We all love according to our natures."

[Henry Rios, with Raymond Reynolds, therapist] "Somewhere along the line, I had died." "What does that mean, Henry?" he inquired in his mild voice. "The thing that makes us human, the recognition of being alive, I had lost that. I drowned it in bourbon and kept myself so busy with work that I hadn't even noticed until that moment."

[John, to Henry] "Here's your dog. Con todo, like you said. Mustard, relish, onion — you sure it's okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?"
"If it's not," I said, biting into the hot dog, "I'll die a happy man."

Since then, however, his city had disintegrated around him, shattered buildings and the glassy-eyed dead transforming familiar landscapes into a circle of hell. He had felt the fear of the adults whom he had once believed were impervious to fear and invincible in their certainties. The world had taught him there are no certainties and ultimately no safety. Terrible things happened without warning or explanation. He blinked back his tears. He was not yet a man, at least not like his father or Tió Damian, but he could no longer be a child. He felt the world's enmity and he responded not with a child's grief but a man's defiance, as if his blood were being infiltrated with threads of iron.

Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide.

Our culture is in large part a majority-takes-all, reward-and-punishment system of sexual preference. It expresses itself by not only marginalizing minority preferences but by obsessively associating them with immorality and perversion.

[Dr Hayward, to Henry Rios after his heart attack] "You're still a relatively young man. You'll be around for a while. Make the best of it, Henry. Live every moment as fully as you can, even if all you're doing is eating a bowl of soup."

His eyes were judging me. It was as if I was the last of a long line of grown-ups who would fail him.

[Edith] "If you tell a child he's bad long enough and often enough, he will act it out."