Michael Nava quotes

He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural. (Michael Nava)
While his father had railed against the church, to Sarmiento, the Christian sky-king, the virgin impregnated by the air, and the man who came back from the dead were stories so manifestly absurd they did not merit much more than a raised eyebrow and a shrug at human credulity. View quote
Michael Nava
He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries. View quote
Michael Nava
The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary. View quote
Michael Nava
This is my life, I thought, these are the people among whom I have spent it, prostitutes, tattooed boys with dead eyes, and horny cops. View quote
Michael Nava
It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on. View quote
Michael Nava
As far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church was just another totalitarian political entity, like the Communist Party or IBM, but I had to admit, it put on a good show. I watched the theatrics unfold. View quote
Michael Nava
It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown. View quote
Michael Nava
He was a great and impartial hater; anyone different from him became an object of his contempt. View quote
Michael Nava
I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude. View quote
Michael Nava
It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners. (Michael Nava)
They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these people were full of. View quote
Michael Nava
His eyes were judging me. It was as if I was the last of a long line of grown-ups who would fail him. View quote
Michael Nava
The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety. View quote
Michael Nava
He had the open, cheerful, rather self-satisfied countenance of someone upon whom life had made very few demands. View quote
Michael Nava
All I knew about his life was that he had had the kind of childhood that turns people into psychological time bombs. How would I react when he started to go off? Did I have my own time bomb ticking away in me? View quote
Michael Nava
[Alex] "I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here." View quote
Michael Nava
[Inez] "...If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications." View quote
Michael Nava
[Asuras] "There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing." View quote
Michael Nava
[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that? View quote
Michael Nava
[Henry, to Rod] "Hell's not a place, Rod, it's something people do to each other." (Michael Nava)
[Henry] "...when you start running from yourself, you end up in some pretty dark places." View quote
Michael Nava
What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be. View quote
Michael Nava
Many Americans share the feeling that our society has forgotten how to mind its own business. View quote
Michael Nava
For many years, the single most potent weapon in the armoury of invisibility was the shame with which gay men and women were taught to regard their sexual nature. What kindles the fury of the antigay right at the gay and lesbian claim to equality and freedom is the implicit rejection of that shame. The energy released by that triumph over shame is what makes the movement so powerful. The gay and lesbian movement signals the existence of a people who have decided that they know more about themselves than what has been shoved down their throats by an ignorant and fearful society. View quote
Michael Nava