“[on the internet] “wearing sweatpants and a tee shirt, I found it easy and intensely gratifying to relish the compliments and heterosexual advances of men I surely would have avoided had I encountered them in person.”

“no matter how much I resist authority, I am everywhere implicated in this text.”

“Most, I loved James Baldwin's essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid. In Baldwin I found a readiness to rise to prophetic wrath, something like those ministers, and yet, once more, to bend down in tenderness, to call grown men and women "baby" (a whiff of the theater). Watching Baldwin on television—I will always consider the fifties to have been a sophisticated time—fixed for me what being a writer must mean. Arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude.”

“The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.”

“Why do people give into stereotypes others have about them? Why would you ever let someone else's negative thoughts dictate how you're going to leave your life?”

“There are always going to be some people in life who disappoint you and don't believe in you like you hoped they would, and you have to find the strength to rise about it and realize that they're wrong. You're still a worthy person whether they thing so or not. If there's no one else to tell it to you, then tell it to yourself.”

“i finally got t this place were it feel right were i knew i belong were i didn't give crap maybe is not the right place but i feel save”