Top 40 Brandon Taylor Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Overhead, trees dappled in sunlight. You can’t know how beautiful the sun is there, how it touches everything and soaks it through, succulent, like water, like moisture. Light beading on the skin, dew, glistening. So much light, an ocean of it, a sea of light spread across everything.”

— Brandon Taylor

4. “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

5. “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

6. “He smiled because he was not sure how to meet someone’s sympathy for him. It always seemed to him that when people were sad for you, they were sad for themselves, as if your misfortune were just an excuse for them to feel what it was they wanted to feel. Sympathy was a kind of ventriloquism.”

— Brandon Taylor

7. “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

8. “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

9. “I knew even then that I was going to hell, that I couldn’t make sense of the space in me that was supposed to be where God slept but in me was just a cavity like a tooth waiting to turn to rot, my soul a blackness, a wound gone sour.”

— Brandon Taylor

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “What Roman is referring to is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of some requisite sameness. This deficiency cannot be overcome. The fact is, no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns or how many skills he masters, he will always be provisional in the eyes of these people, no matter how they might be fond of him or gentle with him.”

— Brandon Taylor

19. “Kindness is a debt, Wallace thinks. Kindness is something owed and something repaid. Kindness is an obligation.”

— Brandon Taylor

20. “Silence and laughter, silence and laughter, switch and swing. The way one glides through this life without having to think about anything hard.”

— Brandon Taylor

21. “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

22. “Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying.”

— Brandon Taylor

23. “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

24. “The world had not seemed dangerous to him until that moment. That was the blessing of certain childhoods. The illusion of your invincibility. Your safety. Some people didn’t know the danger they were in until years later, looking back. That was a kind of blessing, too, in a way. The ignorance of your own peril.”

— Brandon Taylor

25. “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.”

— Brandon Taylor

26. “It’s... mostly fine,” Wallace admits, getting too close to the bone. He doesn’t want to go back over the thing about how grief can feel diffuse and dense all at once, like a flock of birds in the sky. He doesn’t want to get into it. He can taste dirt on his lips and in his mouth, granular and salty.”

— Brandon Taylor

27. “He is both here in his body with Miller and elsewhere, beyond; that all the moments in his life are gathered up in this moment, that all of it has been for this. He is in the world, everywhere he has ever been and everywhere he will go, simultaneously. Yes, he thinks, yes.”

— Brandon Taylor

28. “She wanted to say something about that to Peter, about Irina and how the trees grew more beautiful just as they seemed to die for the season, and how that was a sign of life. Only living things got to die, after all. She had not understood that before, but now she did, and she wanted to say some of it to Peter, hoping he’d say it to Irina. That dying meant you had lived.”

— Brandon Taylor

29. “I think that’s the difference between us,” Wallace says. “You want to talk about it. And I don’t see the point.”

— Brandon Taylor

30. “He does not want to get swallowed up by it again, by this way of looking at things without looking at them, by this oblique shadow-speak. Just because you say you’re sorry, or you say that someone doesn’t deserve something, does not erase the facts of what has or has not happened, or who has or has not acted.”

— Brandon Taylor

31. “Anger could be like that, moving from person to person like an illness or a plague. The way Wallace himself was cruel at dinner, lobbing that grenade at Vincent because of what had been said to him. Or the way that telling Miller about Alabama prompted Miller to tell him about Indiana, the two of them passing cruelty back and forth like a joint. Perhaps friendship is really nothing but controlled cruelty.”

— Brandon Taylor

32. “There are no bad people,” Wallace says with a shrug. “People do bad things. But after a while they’re just people again.”

— Brandon Taylor

33. “What he was about to say was that such a display would have felt vulgar in a way, that to make so gross a statement about his feelings, or his attitude, seemed too direct, too intrusive. 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

34. “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.”

— Brandon Taylor

35. “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

36. “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

37. “Charles had too much self-respect to consider himself a contemporary dancer. He had been classically trained, or whatever passed for classical in Maine, and he had certain ideas about what that meant.”

— Brandon Taylor

38. “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

39. “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

40. “Or maybe everyone was a prodigy if they worked hard enough and long enough and became, at a young age, competent at a thing. Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.”

— Brandon Taylor

41. “Charles always felt dirty, implicated. The act of telling her held a mirror up to what he’d done, which was ordinary and base and simple and just the kind of thing that people did with one another or to one another, but somehow, in the duplicating that retelling required, it became something else. When he could see himself, really see himself, he didn’t like what he saw.”

— Brandon Taylor