Brandon Taylor > Quotes

“The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth as if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It's unfair because white people have a vested interest in undermining racism, it's amount, it's intensity, it's shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“This could be their life together, each moment, shared, passed back and forth between each other to alleviate the pressure, the awful pressure of having to hold time for oneself. This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each others hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves because they know that the other person will not.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“You have to let it go if you're going to keep moving, if you're going to survive, because the past doesn't need a future. It has no use for what comes next. The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don't hold it back, if you don't dam it up, it will spread and take and drown.
The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can't live as long as my past does. It's one or the other.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“It feels impossible in the way only possible tasks can seem, when you know that despite the scale of what you must do, it’s not really beyond the realm of possibility to do it, and so it feels impossible because you know you must.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes. Wallace presses his tongue flat. “Good white people,” he says.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“This is why Wallace never tells anyone anything. This is why he keeps the truth to himself, because other people don’t know what to do with your shit, with the reality of other people’s feelings. They don’t know what to do when they’ve heard something that does not align with their own perception of things.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life's history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body. An accounting of his body's failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he's been made and planted.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Affection always feels this way for him, like an undue burden, like putting weight and expectation onto someone else. As if affection were a kind of cruelty too.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“He felt chastened by that. Yes, it was his father. He knew that. But the trouble with these people, with his friends, with the world, was that they thought things had to be a certain way with family. They thought you had to feel something for them, and it had to be the same thing that everyone felt or else you were doing it wrong.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Cruelty, Wallace thinks, is really just the conduit of pain. It conveys pain from one place to another -- from the place of highest concentration to the place of lowest concentration, in the same way heat flows. It is a delivery system, as in the way that certain viruses convey illness, disease, irreparable harm. They're all infected with pain, hurting each other.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“There comes a time when you have to stop being who you were, when you have to let the past stay where it is, frozen and impossible. You have to let it go if you’re going to keep moving, if you’re going to survive, because the past doesn’t need a future.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“He swallows down what he wants to say: that a person doesn't belong to you just because you're in a relationships, just because you love them. That people are people and they belong only to themselves, or so they should.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Emma puts her head on Wallace's shoulder but she won't say anything either, can't bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it. That's the frustrating part. Wallace is the only one for whom this is a humiliation.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“That if the world has made up its mind about what you have to offer, if the world has decided it wants you, needs you, then it doesn’t matter how many times you mess up. What Wallace wants to know is where the limit is. When is it no longer forgivable to be so terrible? When does the time come when you’ve got to deliver on your gifts?”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“That he wants to be alone. That he does not want to speak to anyone. That he does not want to be around anyone. That the world has worn him down. That he would like nothing more than to slip out of his life and into the next. That he is terrified, afraid. That he wants to lie down here and never move again. What he means is that he does not know what he wants, only that it is not this, the way forward paved with words they’ve already said and things they’ve already done. What he wants is to break it all open and try again.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“They called you brave when you went limping through your life, as if the very difficulty of it were a sign of moral courage or valour. But there was nothing noble in suffering. There was nothing brilliant or good about the failed endeavour to exit one’s life.”
― Brandon Taylor, Filthy Animals

“The past is greedy, always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don’t hold it back, if you don’t dam it up, it will spread and take and drown. The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can’t live as long as my past does. It’s one or the other.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“That’s all culture is, after all, the nutrients pervading the air we breathe, diffusing into and out of people, a passive process.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“And the world went on. It always does. The world doesn’t care about you or me or any of this. The world just keeps on going.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“There is so much trouble in the world. There are people suffering everywhere, at every moment. Who is happy, truly happy, ever? What is a person to do with it all? Except to try to slide laterally out of one’s life into whatever gray space waits for them.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“The way some people could choose to be in a moment with others or not. It was a choice he didn’t have access to, personally. He always felt that he was arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on.”
― Brandon Taylor, Filthy Animals

“Miller: "You are so determined to be unknowable."
Wallace: "We are always unknowable.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“But the trouble with these people, with his friends, with the world, was that they thought things had to be a certain way with family. They thought you had to feel something for them, and it had to be the same thing that everyone felt or else you were doing it wrong.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“But that was the misery of trying to become something, misery that you could put up with because it was native to the act of trying. But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“She could have told Marta anything at all, and Marta would have believed her. But maybe that’s what love was, she thought to herself as she fell asleep. Maybe love was that you didn’t try too hard to tell the difference. Maybe love was just believing something to be true because you’d been told. • • •”
― Brandon Taylor, Filthy Animals

“It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“They thought you had to feel something for them, and it had to be the same thing that everyone felt or else you were doing it wrong.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life