If We Were Villains

For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.

Were you in love with him?' 'Yes,' I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. 'Yes, I was.' It's not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I'm in love with him still.

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.

What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends? … That,’ Frederick said, 'is where the tragedy is.

Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.

One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.

Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.

There is no comfort like complicity.

The things about Shakespeare is, he's so eloquent...he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.

Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.

You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.

I never asked where he went, worried he wouldn’t ask me to follow.

I don't know, it's like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets makes sense. The good ones, anyway.

Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?” The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it.

Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.

For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.

James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.

When did we become such terrible people?” “Maybe we’ve always been terrible.

The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.

Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.

We’re only ever playing fifty percent of a character. The rest is us, and we’re afraid to show people who we really are. We’re afraid of looking foolish if we reveal the full force of our emotions.

One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?

But in Shakespeare's world, passion is irresistible, not embarrassing.

Make art, make mistakes, and have no regrets.

The real sky was enormous overhead, making our mirrors and twinkling stage lights seem ridiculous- Man’s futile attempt to imitate God