Joel Derfner Quotes & Sayings

But I could not bear to look into this man's eyes any longer and see such voracious need, because what if I realized that I was standing in front of a mirror? — Joel Derfner

There are two differences between an orgy and a sex club. First, at a sex club it's considered bad form to introduce yourself to someone before you start putting parts of his body in your mouth. At an orgy you are allowed to offer your name as long as you do so with an obvious sense of irony. — Joel Derfner

People aren't tidy creations to be stacked neatly in the Tupperware or poured in premeasured quantities from a box into the Cuisinart with no spills; everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess. — Joel Derfner

It is easy to see in retrospect that what I longed for was not a boyfriend but a version of me without my defects
a man in whom I could see myself as flawless, a man whose jokes always caused riotous laughter instead of sometimes falling flat, whose German was fluent instead of passable, who actually knew everything instead of pretending to and then Googling it when he got home. — Joel Derfner

For the most part I felt nothing but scorn for an art form that required the pretense that it was natural for people to communicate with one another in rhymed song. — Joel Derfner

Everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess ... the scattered moments of kinship we feel with others are, when reduced to their most basic elements, accidental discoveries of kinship with ourselves. — Joel Derfner

At the time he seemed both ancient and French, but the wisdom that has come with age tells me he was thirty-two and faking the accent. — Joel Derfner

I love my life because a part of me has learned how to give up hope, and that, I suspect, is a dangerous lesson to unlearn. — Joel Derfner

Next time, involve me in what you're planning. How had I gone so easily from feeling excluded to doing the excluding? Did I dislike the reminder that I hadn't always been on the inside looking out? Was I so relieved to be there that I didn't notice the people who still wanted desperately to be invited in? Had I learned that the only way to be part of a society was to shun its outcasts? — Joel Derfner

Yes, being gay is just one of a thousand traits that make up my character, no more remarkable than my love of M&M's or my ability to mess up a room in fifteen seconds flat or my failure to understand the appeal of Luke and Owen Wilson.
But I believe that the desire to love and be loved is the strongest force on earth. And in that way, being gay affects every interaction in which straight people take part. Every human motive is in the end a yearning for companionship, and every act of every person on this planet is an effort not to be alone. — Joel Derfner

Did you just say you
Think Mansfield Park is boring?
Get out of my house. — Joel Derfner

In intimate conversation I am as supportive and positive as the next man, but gatherings of happy people make me miserable. I long to share in the collective joy, but instead I am racked with anxiety. — Joel Derfner

I had never before seen somebody I admired understand what was expected of him, choose to act otherwise, and be happier for it. For the first time in my life I realized that it was possible to reinvent oneself. — Joel Derfner

Mostly, though, I prefer to believe that God has no grace to give. Because the alternative is that He gives grace capriciously or, even worse, that He plays favorites. Some desolate valleys become places of springs, and others wither until they are sere beyond hope, and if God is the one who chooses which is which then I would rather live in a universe lucky enough to have escaped His notice. — Joel Derfner

This is what drives me crazy whenever I hear people say things like, "Ask the universe for what you want, and you'll get it," why I fucking hated that Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist that everybody was reading int he late nineties. Whenever I saw the book in anybody's hands on the subway I always wanted to say, "So the reason a million Tustis were just slaughtered in Rwanda is that they didn't ask the universe not to kill them? — Joel Derfner