“He imagined all the boys he wanted to know lying sleepless in their cramped and cluttered rooms, the curling posters and chipped trophies, the endless cords to defunct video game consoles, all of it once the feeble altar of teenage triumphs, now the detritus of adolescence. He wavered through the blocks, searching each window for a face and, finding none, lent his face to the overcast sky, a bowl so emptied it was hard to imagine it held anything at all, let alone entire flocks of geese.” GayLonelyBoyLooking For Love Book:The Emperor of Gladness Source: The Emperor of Gladness
“So on summer evenings, when summer finally came, and the full moon lit the fields so silver, you could squint and it would still look just like it did after snowfall. On those nights, Noah and I would run together through the tobacco, like this. And there was this mighty clear sky full of stars that made you stop and look up, you head empty as a ladle as you tried to locate yourself inside an immeasurable universe. And no one knows where you are and you feel, for a tiny second, that you have no parents, that they never existed at all, which is impossible and shameful to love, but I did. I loved that feeling.” FreedomGayTeenagers Book:The Emperor of Gladness Source: The Emperor of Gladness
“The boys had this way of knowing what the other was thinking without ever using words. "Because it's like that when you're fourteen," he said. The superpower of being young is that you're closest to being nothing - which is also the same as being very old.” FriendshipBoysYouthGay Book:The Emperor of Gladness Source: The Emperor of Gladness
“The boy wasn't beautiful. Not even handsome in this gentle, dusky light. It was only that they were the same age, and that they worked there, shoulder touching through the steaming, aching hours, passing cigarettes back and forth in this lot, the filter's taste changing: slick and slightly sweeter from the blue Gatorade Russia sipped through his shift. Can camaraderie - the bond of working in unison - be eno0ught to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face, to find him somehow more complete despite his unrecognizable beauty, the smell of his armpits seeping through his work polo, that garlicky, vinegary scent of humanness canceling the drugstore deodorant he wore to hide it? Yes, Hai realized now - it was.” FriendshipGayBoy Book:The Emperor of Gladness Source: The Emperor of Gladness