Paul Russell Quotes & Sayings

#1. Had she allowed the flame to burn so low it was now in danger of complete extinction?

#2. 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

#3. Does everybody always have to be on the prowl for love?

Paul Russell

#4. He had had an inkling, even then, that only by losing himself, the well-behaved Connecticut boy he'd always been, might he ever hope to find his other, truer self.

Paul Russell

#5. Romance always involved a bit of deceit.

Paul Russell

#6. What was inside him would never go away. What had happened would never not have happened.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#8. She simply could not imagine lives ending so soon. Oh, you poor young men, she thought wildly.

Paul Russell

#9. Nobody disappears completely anymore. The only thing that's disappeared is privacy, which is never coming back. And which is probably a good thing. Why should anything be private? No hiding, no guilt, no shame. Just a completely transparent world.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#11. On rooftops overlooking each crossing, Cossacks had begun setting up machine guns.

Paul Russell

#12. 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.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#15. The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.

Paul Russell

#16. 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?

Paul Russell

#17. Was this what was called falling in love, this wayward glimpse of another person's soul?

Paul Russell

#18. If you're going to fall for men, or boys, then deal with the fact that you're going to be an outcast. It's not for the faint of heart, it's not for anybody hoping to be liked or respected or accepted or any of that bullshit.

Paul Russell

#19. Did one learn or was one shaped?

Paul Russell

#20. 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.

Paul Russell

#21. Why not simply surrender to one's doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#23. What did beauty matter, anyway?

Paul Russell

#24. Leigh stands there, not so much a figure to scare crows as to beckon doves.

Paul Russell

#25. 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

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

Paul Russell

#27. Anybody can be anybody, he told himself as he eased his body down onto Devin's, the blunt pain of a beautiful pleasure wedging him open.

Paul Russell

#28. What bound people together was so fragile.

Paul Russell

#29. 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

#30. 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.

Paul Russell

#31. 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.

Paul Russell

#32. The world is what it is.

Paul Russell

#33. The former East Germany hardly had a monopoly on complicity. Life's every moment caught one out in one form or another.

Paul Russell

#34. 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.

Paul Russell

#35. Love was like death that way.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#37. Dresden, which I am told presents no military or industrial targets whatsoever for the RAF.

Paul Russell

#38. Absolutely, love matters," she reiterated. "We forget that at our own risk.

Paul Russell

#39. The miracle," Claire said, "is that anybody stays together.

Paul Russell

#40. Sometimes what you depend on is other people being even more wacked than you are.

Paul Russell

#41. Whose fine idea had it been, on the Olympian heights or deep in the bowel-dark underworld, to condemn us to the messy, intractable burden of bodies, the sheer tedium of our confinement in the flesh?

Paul Russell

#42. The damage love does when love goes astray. And did it ever, given half a chance, fail to wander?

Paul Russell

#43. There was always something sly about any act of education. Eve had learned that in the garden.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#46. The past is the past. It's the present we should worry about.

Paul Russell

#47. Then it comes to him - how you can't return to a place you've never been to, can't recapture what you never had. The chances you miss stay missed forever.

Paul Russell

#48. I'm talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.

Paul Russell

#49. Better to burn than to rot.

Paul Russell

#50. 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

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

Paul Russell

#52. This whole fucking country's got it great and doesn't even know it. Why? Because the price for having it so great gets paid somewhere else, by somebody else, where you don't have to see it. Out of sight, out of mind. That's the fucking key to the whole shit system. Stay blind, stay deaf.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#54. God answers every prayer, Rabbi Schumann once told him, years ago. Mostly His answer is 'no'.

Paul Russell

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

Paul Russell

#58. Okay, he thinks, perhaps it's time for everybody to move on; nothing lasts forever, it's part of the physics of friendships, alliances, whatever it might be they perpetrated for a while among themselves.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#60. 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.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#64. 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

#65. 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.

Paul Russell

#66. Sometimes Anatole wonders just where the elusive point is, where you stop being sane.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#68. The slippery slope was everywhere.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#71. Everything I say is right.
Everything I say is wrong.
There are many conflicting opinions in this industry.
Don't take one person's word as gospel, including mine.
Take what works for you.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#73. Fuck it. All she thinks about these days is whether something'll get her into trouble. Who cares? There was certainly a time when she didn't: and she was a better person then.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#75. 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

#76. There are a few scattered moments in one's life when everything seems possible.

Paul Russell

#77. We should all be merely animals. As humans, there are miseries nothing can put us out of.

Paul Russell

#78. 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

#79. And anyway, never, never apologise the morning after for what your hormones were telling you last night.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#81. Haven't you ever gotten carried away and done something totally spur of the moment like that?"
"Everybody gets carried away from time to time," Tracy told the boy who had carried him away.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#83. Louis had learned to be suspicious of the word educational. It covered, after all, a multitude of sins.

Paul Russell

#84. That milky splatter on the sheets makes him unbearably sad, and he wonders, not for the first time, whether the whole point of orgasm isn't, somehow, unbearable sadness.

Paul Russell

#85. 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

#86. 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.

Paul Russell

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

Paul Russell

#88. Homo sapiens, which as far as I can tell is only another way of saying weaponised chimpanzees who are hellbent on tearing their cage apart without realising it's not a cage, it's their fucking life support they're shredding.

Paul Russell

#89. TO MY MIND, PUSHKIN BEST SUMS UP THE SEASON: Lovely summer, how I could cherish you / If heat and dust and gnats and flies were banished.

Paul Russell

#90. 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

#91. Having without having: it's possible, isn't it, that that's worse than not having at all?

Paul Russell

#92. The presence of the policeman around the corner is the only thing that keeps us civilised.

Paul Russell

#93. Getting drunk or high every night. Being hungover every morning. You run out of options at a certain point. You come to understand why everybody else is living the boring life. And it doesn't look so boring anymore.

Paul Russell