“ You get exactly what you want, Anatole’s always suspected, only when you get it it’s no longer what you want, you need something else. Paul Russell
“ 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 ... Paul Russell
“ 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. Paul Russell
“ 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. Paul Russell
“ Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed? Paul Russell
“ 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. Paul Russell
“ The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart. Paul Russell
“ 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. Paul Russell
“ 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:… Paul Russell
“ 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. Paul Russell
“ 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. Paul Russell
“ If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be? Paul Russell
“ 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? Paul Russell
“ Despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one’s whole life in irreversible conflagration. Paul Russell
“ 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 appetite… Paul Russell
“ There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all. Paul Russell
“ 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 w… Paul Russell
