23 quotes found
“These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from 'Frog and Toad,' and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, ...”
“. . . breathing slowly and rubbing his palm against his chest as if to soothe his heart.”
“...he lacked the sort of ambition that JB and Jude had, that grim, trudging determination that kept them at the studio or office longer than anyone else, that gave them that slightly faraway look i...”
“They have been having sex for eighteen months now (he realizes he has to make himself stop counting, as if his sexual life is a prison term, and he is working toward its completion).”
“But then, once you agree, it is necessary that you, the cajoler, move into the realm of self-deception, because you can see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don't want to be here,...”
“But mostly, I missed watching you two together; I missed watching you watch him, and him watch you; I missed how thoughtful you were with each other, missed how thoughtlessly, sincerely affectionat...”
“This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.”
“That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem's side of the closet, which he has still not emptied. Here are Willem's shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lin...”
“He will be someone who is defined, first and always, by what he is missing.”
“My phone rang, and although it wasn't a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew.”
“It's a good story,' he said. He even grinned at me. 'I'll tell you.''Please,' I said.And then he did.”
“He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.”
“Thank god he wasn't a writer, or he'd have nothing to write about.”
“That morning he feels fresh-scrubbed and cleansed, as if he is being given yet another opportunity to live his life correctly.”
“He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem's heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and hi...”
“He didn't really care if they felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin strea...”
“His persistent nostalgia depressed him, aged him, and yet he couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in florescents, were gone. Everyone had been ...”
“He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.”
“. . .the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.”
“In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by...”
