If there’s one thing Casey McQuiston can do is write extra, post-canon, chapters
“God, she's happy. The weather is glorious, people are good, her motorcycle is sexy. It's one of those days when she is just explosively thankful to be alive and in love and gay in New York City.”
“Jane likes Wes a lot. He reminds her of the moody Bushwick boys she used to see at the quieter bars, the ones who only smoked cloves and complained they' d been born a few years too late to be a beatnik. It's the scowl, she thinks, and the air of perpetual malaise. And the mysterious gift for landing the hottest drag queens in the scene.”
“Jane has known she liked girls for a long, long time. Even when she forgot everything else about herself, she remembered English, Cantonese, and being a lesbian. It's never been worth fighting, not for anyone else's sake, but she did sometimes wish things were different. When she watched her dad trudge up the stairs at the end of a long day and into her mom's arms, she'd wished it was posible for her to know that feeling one day, to have a good woman waiting at home.
“She'd always felt happiest and most loved when she was part of something bigger,”
“That night was the first time she ever slept with a woman. She remembers how revelatory it felt, like searching for a word in one language and realizing it only exists in another. Like her whole life she’d had this perfect thing inside her, this thing that had an exact purpose, that would make sense of everything, and she'd been looking for it wrong until that moment.
She wrote: I was on top of her, figuring out how many ways I could make her feel good, and I thought, "I like girls," which is pretty fucking far from groundbreaking for me, but my next thought was, "I love liking girls," and that was a thought i've never had before. I might have fallen a little bit in love with Ann then, the way I think you should fall in love with your first for at least one night. But I completely and permanently fell in love with the way it feels to make love to a woman.”
“The broader she tries to go, the less it's going to feel true. All these small, specific moments, this patchwork of a million faces and voices and hands and street corners and plates of food and songs and fleeting connections—she keeps trying to zoom out of them, but that's where she loses the details. Love is the meal, and love is the ingredients, and love is the whisk and the fire and the order in the window and the reason it came. She can't separate any part from the whole.”
“Life in the future isn't perfect by a longshot, especially not for people like her. There's so much that's still wrong with the world and so many reasons to look over her shoulder every time she walks down the street. But tonight, she's thankful for this. The scrabble forward, the good changes, and always, even now, a basement full of people who'll take her as she came.”
“But the longer she knew August, the longer she loved her, the more she understoad why those girls could never have been for her. Every one of them had only a piece of what she was looking for. A surly disposition here, a pair of glasses there—every girl she’d ever loved for a night or a week or a month had a shadow of August in her.”
“I was standing on a street that felt like home, she wrote, but I didn't have to hide my haircut or change my clothes to save my family from the gossip. It didn’t even matter if any of those aunties had something to say about me. Mom would never know. I loved it.”
“She wants to have the right words, the right attitude, the right gravity to be worthy of what people see in her, but some days she just wants to pick a stupid fight in the grocery store, and some days she wants to do nothing but learn to make a chocolate tart. She's only ever been one person doing what she had to do to survive. Just Biyu, just Jane.”
“Before the Q, Jane never thought she'd be part of any institution recognized by the state, least of all a wedding. Sure, she attended commitment ceremonies in basements and backyards, manned the patio grill while two boys from down the street slow danced under a magnolia tree and the washed-up hippie officiant burned incense to bless their union. Every time, the experience sang hot and sweet in her veins for days after, the way defiant acts of love between her friends always did. But every time, something told her this would never be hers. Probably, she figured, because she never allowed herself to stay with the same girl for more than a month.”
"You started saving for a ring—?"
"Right after I moved in, yeah.”
"If you ask Myla to explain electrical energy." Jane says, winking at the gleam that appears in Myla's eye, "the first thing she'll tell you is that it can't be created or destroyed. Love is like that too. It can be reshaped a million different ways. It can be as big and as impossible to understand as the universe, and it can be as simple as sitting on the other end of the same telephone line, not even saying anything. But in my experience, it'll never be small, and it'll never be short, and it sure as hell won't ever leave you. All it does is find a new place inside you to live, or a new channel to broadcast out of you. It carries you out when the house is falling down. It's the reason why anything good happens, and it's all those good things put together, the picture they make when you step back and really look. Love makes sense of everything. Love makes you real.”
pixelskylines
gummygunk
amandla
