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Michael Nava Quotes

born 1954 United States

Michael Nava (born 16 September 1954) is an American attorney and writer.

United States
Lawyers
Novelists

Random Michael Nava quote

80 quotes

Many Americans share the feeling that our society has forgotten how to mind its own business.

Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)

The fact is that most gay men and women lead, or try to lead, ordinary lives indistinguishable from those of their neighbours.

Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)

This is my life, I thought, these are the people among whom I have spent it, prostitutes, tattooed boys with dead eyes, and horny cops.

Rag and Bone (2001)

AIDS has had the effect of forcing gay men to examine their sexual expression.

Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)

This struggle is not about sex. It is about privacy, individuality, and civil equality and the right of all Americans, not just gay and lesbian Americans, to be free.

Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)

They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these people were full of.

Goldenboy (1988)

He had the open, cheerful, rather self-satisfied countenance of someone upon whom life had made very few demands.

Rag and Bone (2001)

The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety.

The Little Death (1986)

[Henry Rios, to Paul Windsor] "Society is a conspiracy and everyone who's different is its target."

How Town (1990)

He was a great and impartial hater; anyone different from him became an object of his contempt.

The Hidden Law (1992)

Patricia Ryan was a tall, beautiful woman about whom many stories were told, some of them true.

Rag and Bone (2001)

He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries.

The City of Palaces (2014)

He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural.

The City of Palaces (2014)

What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be.

Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)

His eyes were judging me. It was as if I was the last of a long line of grown-ups who would fail him.

Goldenboy (1988)

Downstairs, in the bleak cafeteria, a crazy woman sat at a table carrying on an animated conversation with someone who wasn't there.
The crazy woman got up and shook hands with the air.

The Hidden Law (1992)

I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude.

How Town (1990)

A child's sexual innocence isn't moral, it's literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context

How Town (1990)

What blocks gay equality is prejudice. What fuels the movement for gay equality is the conviction that this prejudice is not constitutionally protected, but that the individual rights of homosexual Americans are.

Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)

Our culture is in large part a majority-takes-all, reward-and-punishment system of sexual preference. It expresses itself by not only marginalizing minority preferences but by obsessively associating them with immorality and perversion.

Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Nava (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.