Michael Nava Quotes

Michael Angel Nava is an American attorney and writer. He has worked on the staff for the California Supreme Court, and ran for a Superior Court position in 2010. He authored an eight-volume mystery series featuring Henry Rios, an openly gay protagonist who is a criminal defense lawyer. His novels have received six Lambda Literary Awards and critical acclaim in the GLBT and Latino communities. Wikipedia

✵ 16. September 1954

Michael Nava: 38 quotes 0 likes

Famous Michael Nava Quotes

“[Alex] "I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here."”

Michael Nava

Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.41 (Chapter 4) [page numbers as per the Alyson Publications Paperback Edition, April 2004]

“[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?”

Michael Nava

Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.146 (Chapter 12)

“[Inez] "…If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications."”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Burning Plain (1997), p.91 (Chapter 8)

“[Asuras] "There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing."”

Michael Nava

Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.258 (Chapter 20)

“[Donati] "You couldn't have planned a worse place to put a city than LA."”

Michael Nava

Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.225 (Chapter 18)

“[Henry, to Rod] "Hell's not a place, Rod, it's something people do to each other."”

Michael Nava

Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.304 (Chapter 23)

Michael Nava Quotes about people

“For many years, the single most potent weapon in the armoury of invisibility was the shame with which gay men and women were taught to regard their sexual nature. What kindles the fury of the antigay right at the gay and lesbian claim to equality and freedom is the implicit rejection of that shame. The energy released by that triumph over shame is what makes the movement so powerful. The gay and lesbian movement signals the existence of a people who have decided that they know more about themselves than what has been shoved down their throats by an ignorant and fearful society.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.129-130

“What is happening in contemporary American society is that people who prefer to be with members of their own sex no longer see this as a reason to be deprived of the rights to citizenship, family formation, and privacy.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.7

“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.”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Rag and Bone (2001), p.153

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

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Goldenboy (1988), p.115

“All I knew about his life was that he had had the kind of childhood that turns people into psychological time bombs. How would I react when he started to go off? Did I have my own time bomb ticking away in me?”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Rag and Bone (2001), p.174

Michael Nava Quotes

“[Alex] Big ideas don't pay the rent.”

Michael Nava

Source: The Burning Plain (1997), p.205 (Chapter 16)

Idea

“[Henry] "…when you start running from yourself, you end up in some pretty dark places."”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Burning Plain (1997), p.282 (Chapter 21)

“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.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.142

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

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.141

Business , Feeling

“It is a sorry fact that prejudice against gays, and the violence it engenders with increasing frequency, are not yet treated by the media with the same clarity that racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, or discrimination against the disabled are.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.126

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

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.55

Men

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

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.53

Women , Men

“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.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.38

Parting

“This argument is not about sexual practices or particular lifestyles. It hinges on whether gay and lesbian Americans are entitled to the same enjoyment as their fellow citizens of the freedom to make choices about how to live their lives without suffering discrimination in consequence.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.154

Making love , Suffering , Freedom

“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.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.6

“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.”

Michael Nava

Source: Non-fiction, Created equal: Why gay rights matter to America (1994), p.4

Sex

“The fighting had ended and his old routines had begun to be re-established ‑ even El Morito had reappeared, skinny and flea-ridden - but nothing was as it had been. He was like someone who had stepped into a long, dark, and frightening tunnel and, coming into the light, could not blink away the darkness that continued to cloud the periphery of his vision. The world was a more arbitrary and crueler place, and even though his family surrounded him, he knew now that he was essentially alone in it.”

Michael Nava

Source: The Children of Eve' series of novels (historical fiction), The City of Palaces (2014), p.323

World , Family , Fight , Light

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

Michael Nava

Source: The Children of Eve' series of novels (historical fiction), The City of Palaces (2014), p.173

“While his father had railed against the church, to Sarmiento, the Christian sky-king, the virgin impregnated by the air, and the man who came back from the dead were stories so manifestly absurd they did not merit much more than a raised eyebrow and a shrug at human credulity.”

Michael Nava

Source: The Children of Eve' series of novels (historical fiction), The City of Palaces (2014), p.99

Dead

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

Michael Nava

Source: The Children of Eve' series of novels (historical fiction), The City of Palaces (2014), p.86

“The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary.”

Michael Nava

Source: The Children of Eve' series of novels (historical fiction), The City of Palaces (2014), p.82

Bird

“It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on.”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Death of Friends (1996), p.189

Cats , Future , Thinking , Reading

“It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific.”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Death of Friends (1996), p.81

Angels , Hostility , Nature

“As far as I was concerned, the Catholic Church was just another totalitarian political entity, like the Communist Party or IBM, but I had to admit, it put on a good show. I watched the theatrics unfold.”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Hidden Law (1992), p.66

“It was the mystery of my sexual nature that a body which was the mirror image of mine could be so compelling and feel so unfamiliar. When I was younger, it had seemed urgent to unravel this mystery because I believed that if it could be explained, the haters would stop hating us. Now I believed that they had no more right to an explanation about me than I did about them and, in any case, they would find other reasons to hate. Now I was simply grateful for his body beside me, known and unknown.”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Hidden Law (1992), p.55

Hate , Feeling , Nature

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

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Hidden Law (1992), p.1

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

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, How Town (1990), p.198

Solitude , Love , Making love

“It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners.”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Goldenboy (1988), p.132

Tree , Housing , Light , Dreams

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

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Goldenboy (1988), p.46

“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.”

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, The Little Death (1986), p.118

Dogs

“You want me to stipulate that the cops violated her constitutional rights?”

Michael Nava

"This is the LAPD we're talking about, Kim. It would be shocking if they hadn't violated her rights."
Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Rag and Bone (2001), p.225

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

Michael Nava

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Rag and Bone (2001), p.187

Self-confidence , Life

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