1
Chris is a little ashamed of having once fallen for him: it makes him sad how everything changes, how ruthless the heart can be.Paul Russell
2
Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?Paul Russell
3
Soon would come the night in which there was no more work — not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.Paul Russell
4
Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.Paul Russell
5
For eventually one gets over reality’s affront to one’s innocence. One grows accustomed to the melancholy fact that we all sell ourselves at one time or another, that whoring is the dirty little secret of our success as human beings.Paul Russell
6
There must have been a time, before Internet porn, when there wasn’t a script. Nowadays, everybody knows exactly how sex is supposed to go.Paul Russell
7
I think good conversation is really the best form of sex.Paul Russell
8
Were archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?Paul Russell
9
Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.Paul Russell
10
Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.Paul Russell
11
The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.Paul Russell
12
But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.Paul Russell
13
The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.Paul Russell
14
It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.Paul Russell
15
And Chris remembers: what they used to talk about was desire. Impossible, longing dreams. Delirious, aching confusion. That was the vital element they lived off … because it was the one thing that mattered. Not things, or achievements, or politics, or fracking or anything else: just sweet naked blameless unending desire.Paul Russell
16
All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.Paul Russell
17
I’m talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.Paul Russell
18
When you get right down to it, we don’t ever want to know one another too well. We want there to be that mystery. Where there’s mystery, there’s hope.Paul Russell
19
To speak a language that was as intimate and free as certain dreams, saying darkly, thrillingly, My cock inside of you. Your come in my mouth ... He focused on the boy’s slim, tight hips; with the tip of his tongue he tasted an asshole’s bitter, forbidden mystery.Paul Russell
20
If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything’s mixed. There’s no absolute good and there’s no absolute evil. There’s just a lot of confusion.Paul Russell
21
Waiting, he thought, was the most miserable condition a man could find himself in. His whole life, he had been waiting for one thing or another.Paul Russell
22
Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.Paul Russell
23
I’ll put it to you simply: love is the enemy. That’s my conclusion. We should all live in our little monk cells and never venture out ...Paul Russell
24
As long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves.Paul Russell
25
Did one learn or was one shaped?Paul Russell
26
Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, last but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one’s feet.Paul Russell
27
People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all.Paul Russell
28
The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.Paul Russell
29
And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.Paul Russell
30
When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.Paul Russell
31
There’s always people looking the other way when the miracles take place, people who want only a good night’s sleep when the stars are dancing, comets falling, the angels leaning low out of midnight with their trumpets, their cantatas of longing.Paul Russell
32
There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all.Paul Russell
33
Was it a form of madness, no longer to be able to trust your sense of things? To be betrayed by decisions apparently arrived at carefully and through reason, but really no more than marauding appetites cunningly tricked out as reasonable choices?Paul Russell
34
Despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one’s whole life in irreversible conflagration.Paul Russell
35
Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.Paul Russell
36
Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?Paul Russell
37
It is Halloween, ” he explains coyly. “I wanted to come out as something beautiful. None of this witch stuff for me. My God, don’t we spend our whole life as witches?Paul Russell
38
Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.Paul Russell
39
If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?Paul Russell
40
Shirtless, they’d stretch out in the long grass and take the healing brunt of a noontime sun that gave no clue of the thunderheads it already, in secret, had begun to breed.Paul Russell
41
Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives.Paul Russell
42
He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.Paul Russell
43
You get exactly what you want, Anatole’s always suspected, only when you get it it’s no longer what you want, you need something else.Paul Russell
44
Absolutely, love matters, ” she reiterated. “We forget that at our own risk.Paul Russell
45
That’s the way Chris lives, warning everyone who gets close of the lightning that may strike. Never touch anything, never make a mark. But Anatole can’t live that way. The world’s too lonely a place: he has to touch things, he has to put his arms around them.Paul Russell
46
My darlings! You can hardly expect an aged crone like me to mar such a lovely event. No, I shall remain here and knit shadows. Now go forth and shine bravely, and think of nothing but love.Paul Russell
47
The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart.Paul Russell
48
Our students didn’t used to come from such damaged families, ” Louis mused. “It’s true what they say. This country really is coming apart at the seams.Paul Russell
49
Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?Paul Russell