Best 58 quotes of Paul Russell on MyQuotes

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

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Did one learn or was one shaped?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

If you’re going to fall for men, or boys, then deal with the fact that you’re going to be an outcast. It’s not for the faint of heart, it’s not for anybody hoping to be liked or respected or accepted or any of that bullshit.

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 ...

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

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

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?

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

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

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.

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

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.

Okay, he thinks, perhaps it’s time for everybody to move on; nothing lasts forever, it’s part of the physics of friendships, alliances, whatever it might be they perpetrated for a while among themselves.

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.

Romance always involved a bit of deceit.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

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’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.

The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.

Though she’s long ago come to her own conclusions – that when you get down to it, it’s always fucking that matters, not talking.

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.

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.

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.

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?