And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.
The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.
People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all.
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...
Did one learn or was one shaped?
As long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves.
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 ...
Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.
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.
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.
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...
When 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.
I’m talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.
All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.
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 mat...
It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.
The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.
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.
The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.
Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.
