Alexis > Books: Read‎ (508)

He wouldn’t kill Tristan with a knife, he’d kill him with such cherishing. He’d offer to take Tristan to the movies, he’d feed him grapes, he’d brush his hair. He’d make a meal for him, the kind his mother had always insisted on when she was in a good mood, food that was meant to be eaten with leisure. He’d peel an orange for Tristan, share the slices of a clementine, drizzle him with honey. It would be embarrassing and he wouldn’t die of humiliation. He would simply live with the providence of it—the sacred proffering of shame.

Nico’s brow arched with prompting and Gideon, wretched and helpless—Gideon, little motherfuck that he was, a true idiot prince—wanted nothing more than to sink to his knees and kiss Nico’s feet. He wanted to buy Nico’s groceries, to write Nico poetry, to sing Nico the songs of his people in terrible Spanish and passable French. He wanted midnights in Brooklyn, golden hour in a galley kitchen, coffee with cream.

“I feel like [said Tristram] we’re in a pretentious film about tortured geniuses.”
“Yes.”
“But actually we’re just babies with expensive glassware.”

This was it ... the only meaning Parisa had left in life. It wasn’t a secret society, it wasn’t an ancient library, it wasn’t an experiment that had taken two decades to design, it was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. The tiny, unceremonious, incomparable miracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting. It was cruel and it was cursed; it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.

The question is not whether the world can end. There’s no question that it can, that it does every day, in a multitude of highly individualized ways ranging from ordinary to biblical. The question is also not whether one man is capable of ending the world but whether it is this man, and whether such destruction is as inevitable as it may seem. What is the problem? The constancy of fate. The liquidity of prophecy. The problem is Einstein’s theory of relativity. The problem is closed-loop time travel. The problem is Atlas Blakely. The problem is Ezra Fowler. The problem is the invariability of the particular strand of the multiverse in which Ezra and Atlas meet.

The sky was the color of corrupted memory.

‘The last time you were here,’ the king said finally, ‘you set fire to something.’
Arthur grimaced down at his hands. ‘Yes. I mean–my apologies.’
‘What was it, do you recall?’
Arthur pretended to think about it. ‘Er– I believe it was your wife, sire.’

Wanting— needing— to be needed, relied on by authority, is her weak spot. It’s what both motivates and terrifies her, which, in psychotherapy world, makes her double the mess.

She wants to be respected, needed, but at the same time she’s so fucking soft for the slightest display of affection. She despises that about herself. Being aware of it doesn’t help, either.

“Maybe I don’t agree with all your teaching methods, but when it comes to motivating the unmotivated, fear and guilt are effective tools”

I wasn’t one to readily offer praise, but with her, I would spill the verities of my soul.

Right here in my classroom, I could’ve broken my vow and fucked her with piss on her legs, virgin blood on my dick, and her heavenly tears soaking the hand I would’ve held so tightly to her mouth.

If it weren't for your maturity, none of this would have happened If you weren't so wise beyond your years I would've been able to control myself.

This is why it was so important to me to insist that the stories in this book are trans history. They are histories of gender not being binary, fixed, or tied to the body. They show there have always been people who disrupt these norms, and there have always been societies in which they aren’t norms at all.

“I spent two hundred years running around, shooting people for a piece of shit who wanted to [SPOILER] What the fuck? What the fuck?”

How Ayane’s name alone is sufficient to extirpate the haunting from her eyes.

Around them, the concert hall colors elegiacally: phthalocyanine blue shadows, viridian luster, an oil painting drowned in the bathyal deep.

This is love too: sacrament, unconditional surrender of the selfish ego […] Love’s work, reminds that memory of Reyha. And sometimes, it is hard work. The work of a funeral. The work of fielding condolences, writing thank-you notes, keeping a son alive, keeping yourself alive, keeping sane when you wake up in bed alone for the first time in more than twenty years. It is the work of saying *yes to the ghost of your dead first love, yes, I accept you’re not coming back, that you choose the grave over me, that it is okay, that I’m here, that we’ll do this together one last time, that I love you, always, always.*

Verdigris kisses her then. She tastes of cool water, salt-sweetened and sunlight-warmed. Of being young, of a youth that Maya knows she never fucking experienced yet there it is, a florescent memory of staggering through early life’s myriad tragedies: first loves and their fumbling sweetness, disintegrating faiths, the dregs of childhood sublimated into the construction of the adult pneuma. All those things, those hominid rights, evoked without advance notice and with searing clarity.

All the small kindnesses she was owed.

All the sweet joys she could have.

She thinks of Reyha in the house she and Rochelle built, haunted and hopeful, hallowed and held by love.

The category of “woman” does not say in advance how many people can participate in the reality it describes, nor does it limit in advance the forms that that reality can take. In fact, feminism has always insisted that what a woman is an open-ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.

Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian, and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if you are Black and someone tells you that you are white, or that you are not racialized in this ostensibly post-racial world. Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do).Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself.

[…]

Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their existence known, denies the use of the categories that lets many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.

Stock’s valid concern is that no woman should be subject to possible rape, and I agree that everyone should share that concern. And yet, if securing women against rape in prison were her main focus, should she not [before focusing on violence enacted by trans women in women’s prisons] consult the statistics on male prison guards engaging in precisely that activity, which, given their magnitude, should, according to her logic, lead to a policy in which no man ever works as a prison guard in any women’s prison? Perhaps she has signed petitions to this effect or written on this policy, but I am not finding it in my research

The night before we recorded “… Baby One More Time,” I was listening to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and fell in love with that sound. I stayed up late so that I’d go into the studio tired, my voice fried. It worked. When I sang, it came out gravelly in a way that sounded more mature and sexier.

Once I felt what was happening, I became so focused on the recording. And Max listened to me. When I said I wanted more R&B in my voice, less straight pop, he knew what I meant and he made it happen.

Then, when all the songs were done, someone said, “What else can you do? Do you want to dance now?”

I said, “Do I want to dance? Hell yeah, I do!”

[The house] lifted up to the sky with two low wings fanning out to either side, its diamond-paned windows picking up what little light they could and gleaming like coyote eyeshine in the dimming day.

The kisses he’d planted on her mouth lingered, deep as cuts upon her flesh, and their memory made her ache.

[Judith’s sister] spoke to her like a lady speaks to a lowly maid. But then they’d been estranged for a long time, long before Judith loved Nathaniel. Grandmother had taught Alice the place she must occupy in life, always two steps above Judith.

Forster’s Indian protagonist, a middle-class doctor with a traditional Muslim family, was not the social or intellectual equal of his Englishman, Fielding, and perhaps true friendship between them would have been impossible even in a non-imperial India. But Forster, whose book omits all mention of the Indian nationalist movement, and who caricatures his only major Hindu character, seemingly cannot conceive of either the kind of Indian (like Surendra Nath Banerjea) who had won entry into the ICS or the kind (like Jawaharlal Nehru) whose critiques of Empire were challenging the foundations of the Raj.

I don’t believe in safe spaces. They don’t exist. I do, however, believe in dangerous stories: The kind that swirl up from inside you when you least expect it, like the voice of a mad angel whispering of the revolution you are about to unleash. Stories that bend and twist the air as they crackle off your tongue, making you shimmer with glamour, so that everyone around you hangs on to your every intoxicating word. The kind of stories that quiet mad girls dream of to bring themselves comfort after crying themselves to sleep at night, that made your poor starving grandfather cross an entire ocean in search of the unbelievable riches someone once told him were waiting on the other side.

And then she kisses me, a kiss that is deep and ferocious. A kiss about the shock of the impact of bodies, slamming together. A kiss about warrior femmes, bodies painted bright for combat, about writhing snakelike on the dance floor of the battleground. About catching the fist before it hits your face and twisting back the arm that tried to hurt you till it breaks. About refusing ever, ever to forget all the femmes that fought and died before us, about screaming their names to the distant stars.

I promised [my mistress] nothing. Not even orgasms. They required minor work on my part and, therefore, were a terrible waste of my time.

My sexual frustration was getting the best of me. I could barely walk straight without thinking of dipping my cock into the nearest open mouth in my vicinity. It’d been days since the last time I sank my dick in a wet pussy, and the last encounter with the fairer sex was lacklustre, to say the least.

"I took her purity and knew that in order to fix this, I would need to give her some of my own pride."

She glared at him. “Why are you always in a fix? Didn’t they teach you anything at that High Hat Academy?”

“Just Latin and nepotism.”

“Ya,” Joe muttered, “I can’t believe ya told ’em, lassie.”

“Wait a moment, lads,” Joe said. “What cockamamie scheme are ya cookin’ up?”