01UndatedChris 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 / quote ↗
02UndatedWas there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?Paul Russell / quote ↗
03UndatedSoon 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 / quote ↗
04UndatedStill, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.Paul Russell / quote ↗
05UndatedFor 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 / quote ↗
06UndatedThere 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 / quote ↗
08UndatedWere archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?Paul Russell / quote ↗
09UndatedEducation teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.Paul Russell / quote ↗
10UndatedJust because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.Paul Russell / quote ↗
11UndatedThe body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.Paul Russell / quote ↗
12UndatedBut 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 / quote ↗
14UndatedIt was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.Paul Russell / quote ↗
15UndatedAnd 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 / quote ↗
16UndatedAll desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.Paul Russell / quote ↗
18UndatedWhen 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 / quote ↗
19UndatedTo 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 / quote ↗
20UndatedIf 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 / quote ↗
21UndatedWaiting, 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 / quote ↗
23UndatedI’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 / quote ↗
24UndatedAs long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves.Paul Russell / quote ↗
