“My outlook was so limited that I assumed that all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause. The weight lifted and some of the guilt evaporated.”

“Being strong is not the same as being a strong being. I should know because cowardice runs in my family, as I always run from my fears.”

“When I lie waking all alone,Recounting what I have ill done,My thoughts on me then tyrannize,Fear and sorrow me surprise,Whether I tarry still or go,Methinks the time moves very slow,All my griefs to this are jolly,Naught so sad as melancholy.'Tis my sole plague to be alone,I am a beast, a monster grown,I will no light nor company,I find it now my misery.The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone,Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.All my griefs to this are folly,Naught so fierce as melancholy.”

“I went to a homosexual high school. I graduated top in my class. I couldn't imagine being on the bottom.”

“Yes, now my mind is easy, I know the game is won, I lost them all till now, but it's the last that counts. A very fine achievement I must say, or rather would, if I did not fear to contradict myself. Fear to contradict myself! If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.”

“What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.”