A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door, or it’s really hard to catch.

— Charles M. Blow

All identity labels are umbrella terms to some degree, but this term 'bisexual' is not only serviceable, but it is sufficient. And yes, it brings together a bunch of people who are maybe shades different from one another. And maybe that's the beauty of labels: that they force you to be with other people and see the difference.

— Charles M. Blow

America is not static. America is striving. And sometimes, America requires critique. Jingoism is an avoidance of realism. You can simultaneously love and be disappointed in the object of your love, wanting it to be better than it is. In fact, that is a measure of love. Honest critique is a pillar of patriotism.

— Charles M. Blow

Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can't get enough sugar from Chocolate. I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good.

— Charles M. Blow

Co-opted convictions will always betray you.

— Charles M. Blow

I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth--that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.

— Charles M. Blow

I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.

— Charles M. Blow

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.

— Charles M. Blow

It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.

— Charles M. Blow

It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark.

— Charles M. Blow