{"quotes":[{"text":"Forever feels a long time when you're eighteen. When you're away from home for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the bitter end.","author":"Jane Green","tags":["au-pair","bookends","bookshop","coffee-shop","dream","friendship","hiv","life","tv-show"],"id":35697,"author_id":"Jane+Green"},{"text":"Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["aids","antiretroviral","antiretroviral-therapies","antiretroviral-therapy","aphorism","aphorisms","aphorist","aphorists","arv","arvs","cd4-cells","cd4-count","cd4-t-lymphocytes","cellular-immunity","dead","death","die","disease","diseases","funny","hiv","hiv-aids","hiv-negative","hiv-positive","human-immunodeficiency-virus","humor","humour","ill","illness","illnesses","immune","immune-system","immunity","joke","jokes","satire","sick","sickness","standard-antiretroviral-therapy","virus","viruses"],"id":55546,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.","author":"Alysia Abbott","tags":["ableism","aids","american-culture","american-history","death","dying","gay-history","gay-rights","history","hiv","lgbtq","stigma"],"id":104510,"author_id":"Alysia+Abbott"},{"text":"Not everyone who has killed themselves because they were HIV positive would have been killed by AIDS.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["accident","accidents","aids","antiretroviral","antiretroviral-therapies","antiretroviral-therapy","aphorism","aphorisms","aphorist","aphorists","arv","arvs","cd4-cells","cd4-count","cd4-t-lymphocytes","cellular-immunity","dead","death","die","disease","diseases","funny","hiv","hiv-aids","hiv-negative","hiv-positive","human-immunodeficiency-virus","humor","humour","ill","illness","illnesses","immune","immune-system","immunity","joke","jokes","kill","killed","killer","killers","killing","satire","self-murder","sick","sickness","standard-antiretroviral-therapy","suicidal","suicide","virus","viruses"],"id":164913,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"I am not a people pleaser. I am not a person who says things because she thinks it will make the other person happy, nor am I a person who offers things she cannot deliver because I want the other person to like me.","author":"Jane Green","tags":["au-pair","bookends","bookshop","coffee-shop","dream","friendship","hiv","life","tv-show"],"id":177251,"author_id":"Jane+Green"},{"text":"HIV is free, why pay for it.","author":"Oche Otorkpa","tags":["aids","cash","free","hiv","money","pay"],"id":179252,"author_id":"Oche+Otorkpa"},{"text":"Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.","author":"Chris Crutcher","tags":["aids","drug-use","hiv","morality","reality-check","viruses"],"id":197430,"author_id":"Chris+Crutcher"},{"text":"Life lessons build strength, and life is truly A Beautiful Struggle.","author":"Andrea Walker","tags":["adversity","aids","hiv","life","struggle"],"id":200776,"author_id":"Andrea+Walker"},{"text":"Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved.","author":"David Levithan","tags":["aids","disease","gay","hiv"],"id":207841,"author_id":"David+Levithan"},{"text":"But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane?All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.","author":"Mark Doty","tags":["aids","beauty-and-sadness","caretaking","comfort","compassion","death","dying","grief","hiv","holiness","hope","inspiration","loss","love","mindfulness","prayer","spirit","suffering","wisdom"],"id":225450,"author_id":"Mark+Doty"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":25,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}