Garrard Conley QUOTES

2 " This affliction is what makes me smarter. This disadvantage is what gives me my ambition. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

4 " Naming something beautiful made it so. I'd seen this in the way the church spoke of marriage as a sacred institution and in the one man plus one woman bumper stickers people sported on their vehicles. The same ones my father would hand to any customer passing through his dealership service department.

Naming something ugly had a similar effect. The sound of my mother's vomiting the night she drove me home had taught me this lesson better than anything else ever had. I was gay, had been named as such, a fact that once ingested had to be immediately expelled. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

6 " What my mother didn’t yet know about being gay in the South was that you never ran out of material, that being secretly gay your whole life, averting your eyes every time you saw a handsome man, praying on your knees every time a sexual thought entered your mind or every time you’d acted even remotely feminine—this gave you an embarrassment of sins for which you constantly felt the need to apologize, repent, beg forgiveness. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

8 " But love was always moving, always pushing us forward—always in action—and we often had no choice but to submit to where it lead us. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

10 " Sometimes it was what you left unsaid or undone that drew you into a state of wonder. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

12 " When I first read the Harry Potter books and learned about the lightning bolt scar on Harry's forehead, I thought, Of course. Of course love worked that way. Of course it left its mark on the beloved. This secret mark protected you, kept you safe from harm, reminded you of who you were. All it took was the smallest symbol and you were safe. As I grew older and discovered my love of literature, I externalized the markings, wrote them down in my Moleskine, kept my notebook close - so much so that when the LIA counselors took away my notebook years later, they took away much of this protection. But they didn't take all of it. The empty pages still carried ghosts. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

14 " LIA was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. But the means to that end—self-loathing, suicidal ideation, years of false starts—could make you feel lonelier, and less like yourself, than you’d ever felt in your life. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

16 " It seemed one talisman had activated the other: Mark’s number taught me that there were secret loves crouched and waiting in the last place you would likely go searching for them. What was Jesus’s compassion anyway but some well-crafted graffiti on the corridors of history, an invitation to follow Him into the most unlikely places? Love could come to you even in a room that seemed drained of it. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

18 " Trauma has made dark what was once painfully clear "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family

20 " Cutting away my roots and the people I loved would transform me into a shell of the person I once was, an automaton stripped of all its gears. "

― Garrard Conley , Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family