Michael Nava Quotes

[Paul Windsor, with Henry Rios] Holding up a red M&M, he added, "I thought they'd stopped making these." "Someone started a letter-writing campaign and got the candy company to start making them again." I opened a 7-Up and took a swig. It was as warm and thick as the air in the room. "It's funny what people get themselves worked up about."

After he left, the three of us sat on a bench worn to the wood by all the fidgeting bottoms that had occupied it before us.

[Jorge Luis] "I am a man like other men who love and suffer. Do I love Ángel? Yes, I love him. Do I suffer because of it? Yes. I suffer because my love for him must remain a secret and our life together enshrouded in lies." He swigged the pulque. "Can you imagine living in a world where there is no place in the sun for you, Miguel? Only a few rat holes like this one."

[Elena] "Raising a kid is the ultimate exercise in trial and error."

[Larry Ross] "There are only two stages to dying, Henry. Being alive and being dead."

[Henry] I shrugged. "Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident."

The harsh emphasis on sinfulness that she heard elsewhere in the city's churches was absent in Padre Cáceres's homilies. Instead, he spoke of fallibility and forgiveness and the passionate, unchanging and ever-present love of Jesus for his people whatever they did and in whatever circumstances they found themselves. At the end of each Mass, before the final blessing, he always reminded them that while Moses had given the Hebrews ten commandments, Jesus had promulgated only two: "Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as you love yourself. Children, that is the whole Gospel."

This argument is not about sexual practices or particular lifestyles. It hinges on whether gay and lesbian Americans are entitled to the same enjoyment as their fellow citizens of the freedom to make choices about how to live their lives without suffering discrimination in consequence.

It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on.

[Henry Rios] I said a prayer, always the same prayer. Two words. Help us.

[Alicia Gavilán] She had learned to distinguish between her personal thoughts and those thoughts that came to her like messages from a deeper source than her own personality. These deeper messages were sometimes consoling, but more often they had a challenging and unsettling quality. Her first impulse was always to resist them [...]. Yet as always happened, the thought simply repeated itself until she was forced to examine her reasons for rejecting it.

[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."

[Josh, and Henry] He sat down again and looked at me. "I just really wanted to see you again." I looked at him. "Why?" "I've seen you before," he said. "I beg your pardon?" "Two years ago you gave a speech at a rally at UCLA against the sodomy law. Remember?" "I gave so many speeches that year," I said apologetically. He smiled. "I remember. Afterwards I came up and shook your hand." The smile faded and he looked at me gravely. "You gave me the courage to be who I am. But it didn't last." "Few of us come out all at once," I said, gently. "It's not the easiest thing to do." He shook his head and frowned. "I never came out at all." "We are at a gay bar," I said. "It's easy to come out in a bar," he said, "or in bed." A shadow crossed his face. "Are you alright?" He stared down at his hands and said, "No." There was a lot of pain in the little word. He grabbed my hand, clutching it tightly. "What is it Josh?" I asked. "He drew a shaky breath. "My life's a lie," he said. "No one knows who I really am, not my friends or my folks. I can't live this way anymore."

Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city's anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks.

[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?