Paul Russell

If I__e learned one thing, it__ that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything__ mixed. There__ no absolute good and there__ no absolute evil. There__ 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__ slim, tight hips; with the tip of his tongue he tasted an asshole__ bitter, forbidden mystery.

When you get right down to it, we don__ ever want to know one another too well. We want there to be that mystery. Where there__ mystery, there__ hope.

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

I__ talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.

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.

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

The past is the past. It__ the present we should worry about.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren__ 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.

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

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

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

There must have been a time, before Internet porn, when there wasn__ a script. Nowadays, everybody knows exactly how sex is supposed to go.

For eventually one gets over reality__ affront to one__ 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.

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.