Paul Russell

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?

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

There__ always people looking the other way when the miracles take place, people who want only a good night__ sleep when the stars are dancing, comets falling, the angels leaning low out of midnight with their trumpets, their cantatas of longing.

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.

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.

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 not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one__ feet.

Did one learn or was one shaped?

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

I__l put it to you simply: love is the enemy. That__ 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.