We forget that at our own risk.

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

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

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?

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 …

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.

What did beauty matter, anyway?

The world is what it is.

There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all.

People always had one kind of animal or another inside them.

What bound people together was so fragile.

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

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

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.

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

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.

You’re the enemy. You’re the one who’s going to defeat yourself.

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

Anarchy raised its seductive head. He could do anything; there was nothing that was not allowed.

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

A long-simmering resentment against the world can burn off more calories than you might imagine.

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.

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

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

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.

Was this what was called falling in love, this wayward glimpse of another person’s soul?

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

Her heart, she had discovered in the last half year, was of durable stuff. You could test its mettle with a hammer.

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

Louis could never shake the suspicion that some people, whether consciously or not, called the storm to themselves.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.