"Do I look like a drunkard, Margo?"
"No."
"Well I am!"
-Faye
"I hate the real world. I refuse to live in it. I'm going to move to Canada!"
-Ryann
"Just shut up and let me convince myself that the world is out to get me!"
-Ravenna
Ges Vorrutyer? He was just a little villian. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, with out lust, or anger, or desire, or any other redeaming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present-they are real.
-Lord Aral Vorkosigan, Cordelia’s Honor, pg.141
Turnabout is fairplay. Payback is a bitch.
-Anita Blake, Circus of the Damned, pg. 114
Some of the younger nobles and courtiers shared his taste for the unseemly side of Ombria. They had no idea why Duncon would stop to sketch a window whose small, thick, cracked panes of glass made the world beyond it undefined, elusive. They would criticize his drawings, follow him into taverns and drink with him, until they recognized what they wanted at the bottom of a bottle or in a face. Then they would let him drift away to find other windows, other doors and passageways that seemed haunting in their ambiguity, as if they led both out and in at once, and to the same place.
-Ombria in Shadow, p.54
Outside, on Middion Street, a million lights greeted Blue: a candlelit AIDS march. Blue was never one fro religious exercises, and that’s what this looked like, a great Mass of flickering light weaving through the darkness. Still, Blue stood and watched the long line of men and women as they passed him, and after a while he waked along, not joining the parade but keeping pace with it, waching it. The calm, the people. Such serenity in the face of such humiliation and loss. The patience. It was what Blue’s people down home called “prayerful.” Blue thought back to his youth, when he would complain to his mother that he had prayed to God and gotten no answer.
“Well, sure, you was answered,” Blue’s mother relished saying. “God said no.”
-Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On? p.476
The problem with you middle-class gay guys is you pass for white. You move to the metropolitain gay centers, and you’re more or less closeted-‘private’, you’d call it-when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you’ve got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That’s how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that?
-Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On? p.445
And yet. Oh, and yet for what happiness has this honesty of yours brought you all? Nobody here seems to have what he wants. Everyone’s uprooted, in a flux. Is this fraternity I see before me? Or lost souls?
-Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On? p.407
"No."
"Well I am!"
-Faye
"I hate the real world. I refuse to live in it. I'm going to move to Canada!"
-Ryann
"Just shut up and let me convince myself that the world is out to get me!"
-Ravenna
Ges Vorrutyer? He was just a little villian. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, with out lust, or anger, or desire, or any other redeaming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present-they are real.
-Lord Aral Vorkosigan, Cordelia’s Honor, pg.141
Turnabout is fairplay. Payback is a bitch.
-Anita Blake, Circus of the Damned, pg. 114
Some of the younger nobles and courtiers shared his taste for the unseemly side of Ombria. They had no idea why Duncon would stop to sketch a window whose small, thick, cracked panes of glass made the world beyond it undefined, elusive. They would criticize his drawings, follow him into taverns and drink with him, until they recognized what they wanted at the bottom of a bottle or in a face. Then they would let him drift away to find other windows, other doors and passageways that seemed haunting in their ambiguity, as if they led both out and in at once, and to the same place.
-Ombria in Shadow, p.54
Outside, on Middion Street, a million lights greeted Blue: a candlelit AIDS march. Blue was never one fro religious exercises, and that’s what this looked like, a great Mass of flickering light weaving through the darkness. Still, Blue stood and watched the long line of men and women as they passed him, and after a while he waked along, not joining the parade but keeping pace with it, waching it. The calm, the people. Such serenity in the face of such humiliation and loss. The patience. It was what Blue’s people down home called “prayerful.” Blue thought back to his youth, when he would complain to his mother that he had prayed to God and gotten no answer.
“Well, sure, you was answered,” Blue’s mother relished saying. “God said no.”
-Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On? p.476
The problem with you middle-class gay guys is you pass for white. You move to the metropolitain gay centers, and you’re more or less closeted-‘private’, you’d call it-when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you’ve got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That’s how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that?
-Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On? p.445
And yet. Oh, and yet for what happiness has this honesty of yours brought you all? Nobody here seems to have what he wants. Everyone’s uprooted, in a flux. Is this fraternity I see before me? Or lost souls?
-Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On? p.407
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