Paul Russell Quotes

But it's not real life. It's just America.

Had she allowed the flame to burn so low it was now in danger of complete extinction?

People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all.

TO MY MIND, PUSHKIN BEST SUMS UP THE SEASON: Lovely summer, how I could cherish you / If heat and dust and gnats and flies were banished.

Leigh stands there, not so much a figure to scare crows as to beckon doves.

Better to burn than to rot.

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.

Despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one's whole life in irreversible conflagration.

The damage love does when love goes astray. And did it ever, given half a chance, fail to wander?

If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?

There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all.

Were archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?

The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart.

God gave us orifices, God gave us wounds.

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

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.

Anybody can be anybody, he told himself as he eased his body down onto Devin's, the blunt pain of a beautiful pleasure wedging him open.

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.

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

Why not simply surrender to one's doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

If it was to be a time of momentous changes, then why not allow oneself to be swept along?

The miracle," Claire said, "is that anybody stays together.

Anarchy raised its seductive head. He could do anything; there was nothing that was not allowed.

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.

Love was like death that way.

Was this what was called falling in love, this wayward glimpse of another person's soul?

You're the enemy. You're the one who's going to defeat yourself.

You know you've got my support", Reid told him. "Whatever difficult decisions you need to make. All I would ask is that you be alert to ... " For a moment he seemed at a loss.
"To what?" Louis said impatiently.
Reid picked up a votive candle from the dresser top and observed its flickering light. "The shimmer of things," he said. "The spirit and not the letter.

Louis had learned to be suspicious of the word educational. It covered, after all, a multitude of sins.

Everything I say is right.
Everything I say is wrong.
There are many conflicting opinions in this industry.
Don't take one person's word as gospel, including mine.
Take what works for you.

Chris is a little ashamed of having once fallen for him: it makes him sad how everything changes, how ruthless the heart can be.

I'm talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.

God answers every prayer, Rabbi Schumann once told him, years ago. Mostly His answer is 'no'.

People always had one kind of animal or another inside them.

Is that racist – I mean, to be attracted to a type? Probably, but what you want is what you want, right? Your dick doesn't know fuck about political correctness, even if the rest of you is pretty well-versed.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

Whose fine idea had it been, on the Olympian heights or deep in the bowel-dark underworld, to condemn us to the messy, intractable burden of bodies, the sheer tedium of our confinement in the flesh?

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Absolutely, love matters," she reiterated. "We forget that at our own risk.

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.

Sometimes Anatole wonders just where the elusive point is, where you stop being sane.

And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.

Does everybody always have to be on the prowl for love?

The world is what it is.

Romance always involved a bit of deceit.

The presence of the policeman around the corner is the only thing that keeps us civilised.

Haven't you ever gotten carried away and done something totally spur of the moment like that?"
"Everybody gets carried away from time to time," Tracy told the boy who had carried him away.

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.

Did one learn or was one shaped?

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?

A long-simmering resentment against the world can burn off more calories than you might imagine.

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 ...

There are a few scattered moments in one's life when everything seems possible.

Getting drunk or high every night. Being hungover every morning. You run out of options at a certain point. You come to understand why everybody else is living the boring life. And it doesn't look so boring anymore.

The former East Germany hardly had a monopoly on complicity. Life's every moment caught one out in one form or another.

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.

Then it comes to him - how you can't return to a place you've never been to, can't recapture what you never had. The chances you miss stay missed forever.

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.

Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.

Sometimes what you depend on is other people being even more wacked than you are.

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.

This whole fucking country's got it great and doesn't even know it. Why? Because the price for having it so great gets paid somewhere else, by somebody else, where you don't have to see it. Out of sight, out of mind. That's the fucking key to the whole shit system. Stay blind, stay deaf.

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.

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.

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.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

I think good conversation is really the best form of sex.

And anyway, never, never apologise the morning after for what your hormones were telling you last night.

Her heart, she had discovered in the last half year, was of durable stuff. You could test its mettle with a hammer.

That milky splatter on the sheets makes him unbearably sad, and he wonders, not for the first time, whether the whole point of orgasm isn't, somehow, unbearable sadness.

She simply could not imagine lives ending so soon. Oh, you poor young men, she thought wildly.

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.

There was always something sly about any act of education. Eve had learned that in the garden.

As long as we do violence to other animals, we'll keep on doing violence to ourselves.

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.