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

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

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

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.

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.

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

Were archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?

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

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 ...

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

Did one learn or was one shaped?

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.

People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all.

The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.

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

When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.

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.

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?

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

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

Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?

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?

Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.

If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?