43 quotes found
“Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, long...”
“The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack yo...”
“Have you ever noticed, he said, stirred now by this vision of domestic bliss that was beyond his reach, and shocked earlier that evening to find himself crying in the subway on his way home from a ...”
“[] and the only reason he came out at all, during that period after he left Frankie, when he wanted to go away and hide forever, was the crazy compulsion with which we resolved all the tangled impu...”
“Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie ...”
“Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac.”
“You are doomed to a life that will repeat itself again and again, as do all livesfor lives are static things, readings of already written papersbut whereas some men are fortunate to repeat a good p...”
“During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous ele...”
“For even now the drums were in our blood, we sat forward almost hearing them across the bay, and the van raced on through the streets so that the driver could hustle back for another load of pleasu...”
“What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed? For this dreary round of amusing insincerity? This filthy bourgeois society that the Aristotelians have foisted upon us? No, we...”
“For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being richthe city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandisingand one evening of his visit to Venezue...”
“He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and re...”
“Homosexuality is like a boarding school in which there are no vacations.”
“I cant help its being gay. I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay, I am what Gus cal...”
“They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.”
“Living for beauty is all very fine, but it’s a hard regimen and burns up the heart very quickly.”
“I’m in mid-passage, darling,” he said, beginning to talk like a queen so as to demystify himself, so as to destroy the very qualities John Schaeffer had fallen in love with, “I’m menopausal, change...”
“A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral—everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief.”
“Try not to be self-conscious […] or so critical. Don’t mope around looking for someone else to make you happy, and remember that the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love ...”
“There are three lies in life,” Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to sup...”
