Michael Nava quotes - page 3

[Donati] "You see why I don't advertise I'm gay?" "No, not exactly, Nick." "Because I don't want to be confused with people like Bob." He tossed back his drink. "Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives." (Michael Nava)
[Elena] "My God is not an unpleasant old man who lives in the sky and forces people to make desperate choices and then condemns them if they get it wrong. For me, God is the clear inner voice that guides us to the choices that are right for us, if we're willing to listen. The choices are different for everyone." View quote
Michael Nava
[John, to Henry] "Here's your dog. Con todo, like you said. Mustard, relish, onion - you sure it's okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?" "If it's not," I said, biting into the hot dog, "I'll die a happy man." View quote
Michael Nava
[John] "I tell you, Henry, I did not want to grow up. I figured if I grew up, I would stop having fun." "Something change your mind?" "No. I was right! You do stop having fun, or maybe the things that were fun when you were a kid stop being fun. For a while I just did 'em more, faster, harder, trying to get the fun back, but it didn't work." View quote
Michael Nava
The Abbey was on Robertson, just below Santa Monica, on the edge of Boys' Town. Low brick buildings housed cafes, clothing stores, coffee houses and watch repair shops that rubbed elbows with gay clubs and sex shops. These establishments catered to hordes of the beautiful young gay men who lived in the big apartment complexes that lined the side streets or who drove in from all over Southern California on weekend nights. I seldom ventured there, because it reminded me of San Francisco in the '70s, when I was a boy just coming out and how out of place I'd felt among the big-muscled boys who cruised each other with cold assessment. Twenty years later, only the faces and the clothes had changed; the air was still charged with the brutal calculation of lust. And beneath that was the claustrophobia of a ghetto, of fearful people looking out at the world from behind invisible fences. View quote
Michael Nava
It had that unnatural stillness of a place where people feared to venture outside. "You better come in before someone tries to kill you," she said. "Did you lock your car?" "Yeah. It has an alarm." "That won't stop anyone around here." "Bad gang problem?" "When I was raising my kids, they used to play out in the streets. You see any kids out there now?" View quote
Michael Nava
[Elena, about daughter] "Now I understand that it isn't up to her to be who I might want her to be. It's up to me to love her for who she is." View quote
Michael Nava
You want me to stipulate that the cops violated her constitutional rights?" "This is the LAPD we're talking about, Kim. It would be shocking if they hadn't violated her rights. View quote
Michael Nava
[Elena] "Raising a kid is the ultimate exercise in trial and error." View quote
Michael Nava
[Miguel Sarmiento] "The principle of all existence is cause and effect. Scientific knowledge illuminates causes so that men are not condemned to go on living ignorantly in effects." View quote
Michael Nava
[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life." (Michael Nava)
You're a fine one to talk about motherhood," Eulalia replied. "You expelled your children from your womb directly into Swiss boarding schools. View quote
Michael Nava
Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city's anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks. View quote
Michael Nava
But something terrible had happened - she had become old. The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs. View quote
Michael Nava
My father was a man of many sayings," Sarmiento replied. "And one of them was "A mas honor, mas dolor." No risk, no reward. View quote
Michael Nava
Since then, however, his city had disintegrated around him, shattered buildings and the glassy-eyed dead transforming familiar landscapes into a circle of hell. He had felt the fear of the adults whom he had once believed were impervious to fear and invincible in their certainties. The world had taught him there are no certainties and ultimately no safety. Terrible things happened without warning or explanation. He blinked back his tears. He was not yet a man, at least not like his father or Tió Damian, but he could no longer be a child. He felt the world's enmity and he responded not with a child's grief but a man's defiance, as if his blood were being infiltrated with threads of iron. View quote
Michael Nava