“Sick, in these days, means alone.”

Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.

“I realize that my experiences of Gaelic are like the view from the door of my basement apartment: a sliver of sky and the row houses across the street. I can never see the whole world that way. Yet Gaelic gives me many glimpses into worlds just beyond.”

I’m no good at masturbating. For me, sex has always been about two, of the hunt or being hunted, of being desired, of falling headfirst into the abyss of the other.

I have stopped dressing to be seen; I dress for walking. I cropped my hair and allowed it to go salt and pepper. With the mask and the hair and the tennis shoes, I am unrecognizable, sometimes even to myself.

I want to go wherever
sense has gone. All words
are injury: sink, swim, kin.

“Time seems not so much to progress as to waft through each novel… solitude enables past, present and future to press in like ghosts.”

“What Taylor gets so right, here, is that community is by nature an elusive thing, never fully realized. There is an inherent melancholy to the idea of community, a paradoxical loneliness that lingers.”

There will always be political and social unrest, but a pandemic filters everything—we are all characters in its story.