A Quote by Dustin Lance Black

Eventually my courageous Mom did something we do all too rarely. She got on a plane and she came to see me in L.A. - this place where we'd always been told sinners lived. She came to see my gay friends.
My mom knew that I was gay. So she just came up to me in the kitchen one night, and she said, 'Justin, are you a homosexual?' And I said, 'Yes,' and that was that. She took all the steps, she went to talk to a family counselor beforehand to see how she should bring it up, and now my mom's my biggest fan.
My mother told me stories all the time... And in all of those stories she told me who I was, who I was supposed to be, whom I came from, and who would follow me... That's what she said and what she showed me in the things she did and the way she lives.
It scared my mom to death when all my friends started driving. She always told me she wanted me to drive, but I think she kind of felt lucky that I didn't get my permit when all my friends did. I think that's been the hardest thing for her, watching me go out with my friends and literally drive away.
Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.
All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.
I remember, my mom, she's lived in Spain for about thirty years, and we were playing the Royal Albert Hall, and she was with some friends from New York. Morrissey came out with the sign 'The Queen is Dead,' and my mom's friends are like, 'Oh my God.' They took it literally.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.
She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little whole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity- did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist. She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.
She [my mother] said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.
When my wife drives, there's always trouble. The other day she took the car. She came home. She told me, There's water in the carburetor. I asked her, Where's the car? She said, In a lake.
She left for Juilliard the day after Labor Day. I drove her to the airport. She kissed me good-bye. She told me that she loved me more than life itself. Then she stepped through security. She never came back.
She didn't care anymore... and she got no pleasure from the work she did, but she did it. Everything bored her. She found that when she didn't have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down. She sat very stupidly with a blank mind until finall 'I feel different' came slowly to her mind. Yes, she thought, after a long pause. And then, after more time, 'Mean, I feel mean.
I quit my day job the day my daughter was born. I remember flying to Cleveland and hitting a thunderstorm, which caused the plane to lose pressure, and the oxygen masks fell from the ceiling. We felt the plane dropping; the pilot was taking it down to regain cabin pressure. My heart was in my stomach. I found out after landing that her mom was in labor. I did the show and came back to New York. By the time I walked into the hospital, my daughter was being born. She was waiting for me. She's a sweet daddy's girl. She's premed. She has her own pie company. She works for Habitat for Humanity.
I would like to say something deeper, but for me, I saw a production of "Fences" in Rhode Island and a fabulous actress played Rose, but when she first came on the stage she was mad. You could just see it. She was all, "Troy stop!" So by the time you get to the revelation scene, I didn't think she loved him, so there was no loss. I think that the real tragedy and the real drama or the thing that makes you lean in is to see the love, to see the commitment. To see the fact that Rose is invested in this marriage no matter what.
She glared at me like she was about to punch me, but then she did something that surprised me even more. She kissed me. "Be careful seaweed brain." She said putting on her invisible cap and disappearing. I probably would have sat there all day, trying to remember my name, but then the sea demons came.
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