"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Did one learn or was one shaped?"
"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."
"There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all."
"Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?"
"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."