Top 90 Josh Lanyon Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If there was one life skill everyone on the planet needed, it was the ability to think with critical objectivity.”

— Josh Lanyon

2. “Knowing and believing are two different things.”

— Josh Lanyon

3. “I know you’ve all heard the advice, “Show, don’t tell.” The best writers don’t tell you, and quite frankly they don’t just show you – they make you feel it, live it, taste it, touch it. Storytelling is about being in the moment with the characters.”

— Josh Lanyon

4. “Vintage books, old china, antiques; maybe I love old things so much because I feel impermanent myself.”

— Josh Lanyon

5. “Hearts got broken every day. Nobody died from that. But it did kind of fade the sunlight and drain the color from the days.”

— Josh Lanyon

6. “The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.”

— Josh Lanyon

7. “Everything a gay man does makes a political statement. Everything matters: where you bank, where you shop, where you eat. When you hold your lover’s hand in public.”

— Josh Lanyon

8. “I liked you the first time I saw you. You were sitting on the floor surrounded by books, and you looked up when I opened the door and smiled right at me. It felt like you had been waiting for me, like you were welcoming me home.”

— Josh Lanyon

Featured in: Romance Quotes

9. “This is how God made me. You are how God made you. All God’s chillun are made how God made ’em. You think God made a mistake, take it up with Him.”

— Josh Lanyon

10. “You got a little bit of an attitude, Mr. English, if you don’t mind my saying so. I don’t mind.”

— Josh Lanyon

11. “You know that thing about Death Be Not Proud? Well, Fear Be Not Proud either. And Fear Be Not Elegant. What Fear be is stumbling, bumbling flight, crashing through brush, slip-sliding on pine needles, sloshing through puddles that are always deeper than you expect.”

— Josh Lanyon

12. “The problem with a life spent reading is you know too much.”

— Josh Lanyon

13. “All cynics are disappointed idealists. The more stars in the eyes, the harder the fall.”

— Josh Lanyon

14. “He needed fresh air and sunshine. A walk in the woods and afterward a good book to read by the fire. Yeah, that was the life.”

— Josh Lanyon

15. “You’re kind of a smart ass when you’re not flat on your face.”

— Josh Lanyon

16. “When you live with a potentially life-threatening condition you get used to the thought of dying. You accept it, you push on. The thing that scared me was the picture of dying slowly and painfully, the loss of independence and identity to illness.”

— Josh Lanyon

17. “Focus on someone else’s problems for a change, I instructed myself. You need the practice. From now on you’ll have to live in a world you didn’t make up. Horrible thought.”

— Josh Lanyon

18. “I’m a thirty-something gay man with a dodgy heart. I sell books for a living. Who wants to read about that?”

— Josh Lanyon

19. “I’m not insane. This is very simple, very straightforward. Provided he doesn’t kill me, its foolproof.”

— Josh Lanyon

20. “He never lied to me. I just didn’t ask the questions I didn’t want to know the answers to.”

— Josh Lanyon

21. “But we all hurt the people we love sometimes. We all let each other down sooner or later. Which is why contrition and forgiveness played a part in any relationship. Trying not to hurt each other, trying not to let each other down in the big things, that was as much as anyone could aim for.”

— Josh Lanyon

22. “I want people to react to my work, to think, to question, to challenge, to cry and laugh and feel.”

— Josh Lanyon

23. “How did people get over this? They obviously did. Every day someone fell in love with the wrong person and had to pack up all their fragile, misguided hopes and unwanted affection, and move on to the next picnic table.”

— Josh Lanyon

24. “Did he want to put a cock ring on me or did he fear I wanted to put a wedding ring on him?”

— Josh Lanyon

25. “I thought again how odd it was to be on formal terms with someone you had once permitted to lick your ears.”

— Josh Lanyon

26. “People loved you in the way they knew how – and often it was not the way you knew. Or needed.”

— Josh Lanyon

Featured in: Romance Quotes

27. “Jake’s mouth found mine, his lips molding hot and soft to my own. His tongue tentatively tested the seal of my lips; I parted them and he pushed inside. It was startlingly sweet and achingly familiar, like finding harbor.”

— Josh Lanyon

28. “Like fine wine, I do not travel well. Sure, when I was young, fresh, low in acidity and not so tannic, I was a more adventurous spririt.”

— Josh Lanyon

29. “And that infrequent and devastating smile – and eyes just the color of a Scottish loch at sunset, sort of green-gold, like summer bracken or polished cairngorm.”

— Josh Lanyon

30. “Shrugging out of the damaged shirt, Jake said roughly, “I still dream about you.” “I have nightmares about you.” I dragged my T-shirt over my head, threw it aside.”

— Josh Lanyon

31. “One thing I’ve noticed about getting older, it takes twice as much work to get half the results one formerly achieved by falling out of bed.”

— Josh Lanyon

32. “I guess it was no secret I’d been unpleasantly startled to find myself suddenly hitting the big 4-0. You’d have thought the previous thirty-nine years were sufficient warning.”

— Josh Lanyon

33. “Like true philosophers I’ve come to believe that religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown after proper education.”

— Josh Lanyon

34. “You feel rain in a used bookstore. The old pages pick up the damp and mustiness like old bones do rheumatism.”

— Josh Lanyon

35. “It was dark.” “I’d know you in the dark, Tucker.” Tucker’s eyes flashed up to meet Elliot’s. He said curtly. “Yeah. I’d know you too.”

— Josh Lanyon

36. “Most people don’t fall out of love at the same time. One person always wants more than the other person can give them. And that ends in bitterness.”

— Josh Lanyon

37. “And I thought maybe I didn’t need to worry about my heart anymore because it had stopped beating a couple of seconds earlier, and I was still sitting there living and breathing-though admittedly I wasn’t feeling much of anything.”

— Josh Lanyon

38. “The only thing I’m sure of is wherever you are is where I belong.”

— Josh Lanyon

39. “I didn’t approve of murder on general principles. Not even of people who seemed to go around begging for it.”

— Josh Lanyon

40. “Anyone who wasn’t half-stoned on pain meds would have instantly realized what a really bad idea this plan was, but since that didn’t include me, I didn’t worry about it.”

— Josh Lanyon

41. “The battle rages eternal, though the race, religion, gender or sexual orientation of those discriminated against changes regularly. Maybe man’s need for a scapegoat is genetically programmed into him.”

— Josh Lanyon

42. “High school, college, the office, evil cults, everywhere you go, there’s that social hierarchy to contend with.”

— Josh Lanyon

43. “Define history. Was it the sequence of factual past events, the stories about the factual sequence of past events, or the interpretation of the stories about past events?”

— Josh Lanyon

44. “A pause followed my greeting. Then “We’re watching you ” whispered the voice on the other end. “Yeah? Did you see what I did with my keys? ” Silence. Then dial tone. These younger demons. So easily discouraged.”

— Josh Lanyon

45. “Being alone wasn’t nearly as lonely as being with people who didn’t love you.”

— Josh Lanyon

46. “If you even try to die, I’ll kill you myself,” Tucker had said in a choky voice.”

— Josh Lanyon

47. “The best fiction captures the truth of real life.”

— Josh Lanyon

48. “But that peek into his uncensored brain made it clear he too realized there was a good chance things weren’t going to work out for us, that the idea of it not working out was already in his mind, and in some corner of his heart he was already preparing for it. And since I was already preparing to prepare for it too, I’m not sure why it made me so sad. But it did. It was like someone cut my lifeline.”

— Josh Lanyon

49. “I hadn’t liked him at first. He did sort of grow on you after a while. Like the cosmopolitans. Or maybe because of the cosmopolitans.”

— Josh Lanyon

50. “No one was in better position than I to know how easily shyness gets misread for arrogance or coldness or indifference.”

— Josh Lanyon