Top 30 Paul Monette Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you finally come out, there’s a pain that stops, and you know it will never hurt like that again, no matter how much you lose or how bad you die.”

— Paul Monette

2. “Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slanted yellow light.”

— Paul Monette

3. “Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.”

— Paul Monette

4. “Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you’re hurting.”

— Paul Monette

5. “When Larry Kramer tells Mathilde Krim in Interview about the closeted gay man at the National Institutes of Health who buried the AIDS data for two years, that’s when I understand how doomed we were before we ever knew. It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference.”

— Paul Monette

6. “I’ve never quite understood the double Janus face of bi – Janus, the Roman god of gates and doors, especially closets.”

— Paul Monette

7. “Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient’s bed. You don’t care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one’s previous citizenship at the border.”

— Paul Monette

8. “Some of the agonies that burn in the heart forever begin as brief as snapshots.”

— Paul Monette

9. “The Bible is still the only dirty book I’ve ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don’t want to hear it.”

— Paul Monette

10. “The struggle for true openness and intimacy is a lifelong struggle for all of us, gay and straight alike. And besides, a difficult life brings you to the core of yourself, where you learn what justice is and how it has to be fought for.”

— Paul Monette

11. “As an artist, you reach for the pen that’s full of blood.”

— Paul Monette

12. “It was said that everyone appointed by the Reagan administration in a major public health capacity was either a Mormon or a fundamentalist. The chief spokesman for the administration now was the overripe and venomous Patrick Buchanan, one of whose major qualifications for the job was his widely quoted remark that nature was finally exacting her price on homosexuals for having spilled their seed against her.”

— Paul Monette

13. “The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.”

— Paul Monette

14. “I suppose we’d been waiting for each other all our lives.”

— Paul Monette

15. “The imagination was the only country where a man could truly breathe free.”

— Paul Monette

16. “Good days are such a mysterious gift that you dare not question them much, and the only problem is they give you a false sense of security.”

— Paul Monette

17. “When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last – and wouldn’t end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all.”

— Paul Monette

18. “What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you’ve kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.”

— Paul Monette

19. “If the government was going to continue to act as if we didn’t exist, if the medical establishment was prone to gridlock over funds, if the drug companies were waiting till the curve got high enough for profit, then we would find our own way.”

— Paul Monette

20. “I knew we must stay in absolute sync, for the enemy had grown so subtle, its camouflage so chameleon, we had to be on constant watch.”

— Paul Monette

21. “Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn’t hold me back.”

— Paul Monette

22. “We were doing the best we could with what we had left, and more and more it was like Diogenes tossing away the tin cup because he could drink with his hands. It turns out there is no end to learning what you can do without.”

— Paul Monette

23. “If later on, as we read this, we might think “How happy we were then!” at least we’ll have that. That as we lived them, these moments, we knew they were important, and that’s all there is.”

— Paul Monette

24. “To experience love as claustrophobia. In such a twisted paradigm lies the sick legacy of a lifetime in the closet.”

— Paul Monette

25. “If it’s true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must’ve kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way – that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man’s eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there’s so much lost time to make up for.”

— Paul Monette

26. “Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self-delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretense that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.”

— Paul Monette

27. “And just getting into bed with somebody wasn’t the magic solution, because people could hide their terrors in pure technique – depersonalizing so completely the body embraced that they felt nothing at all.”

— Paul Monette

28. “Perhaps we were atheists by default, but the matter of God did not come into the equation of our love.”

— Paul Monette

29. “That would be my theme, I thought: once I came out, the world was all windows.”

— Paul Monette

30. “It was the first time I’d ever considered that gay might not just be about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet.”

— Paul Monette

31. “I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over my guys, the gay and the straight and the in-between. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don’t chastise myself for halving the world into us and them. I know that the good guys aren’t all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.”

— Paul Monette

32. “Fate was the issue, if anything; not guilt.”

— Paul Monette

33. “The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become.”

— Paul Monette

34. “If we learned to drive as badly as we learn to make love, the roads would be nothing but wrecks. The erotic can be a window into the deepest core of feeling, but more and more doesn’t get you there.”

— Paul Monette