Quotes by Paul Russell

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.

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

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 ...

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

Did one learn or was one shaped?

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.

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

The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.

Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?

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?

Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.

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

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.