Paul Russell Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Love was like death that way. — Paul Russell

I'm talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire. — Paul Russell

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

Sometimes what you depend on is other people being even more wacked than you are. — Paul Russell

Better to burn than to rot. — Paul Russell

There are a few scattered moments in one's life when everything seems possible. — Paul Russell

What was inside him would never go away. What had happened would never not have happened. — Paul Russell

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

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

The miracle," Claire said, "is that anybody stays together. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

Louis had learned to be suspicious of the word educational. It covered, after all, a multitude of sins. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

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

But it's not real life. It's just America. — Paul Russell

God gave us orifices, God gave us wounds. — Paul Russell

You're the enemy. You're the one who's going to defeat yourself. — Paul Russell

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

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

Had she allowed the flame to burn so low it was now in danger of complete extinction? — Paul Russell

The past is the past. It's the present we should worry about. — Paul Russell

What did beauty matter, anyway? — Paul Russell

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

Romance always involved a bit of deceit. — 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? — Paul Russell

You know you've got my support", Reid told him. "Whatever difficult decisions you need to make. All I would ask is that you be alert to ... " For a moment he seemed at a loss.
"To what?" Louis said impatiently.
Reid picked up a votive candle from the dresser top and observed its flickering light. "The shimmer of things," he said. "The spirit and not the letter. — Paul Russell

Why not simply surrender to one's doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed? — Paul Russell

And anyway, never, never apologise the morning after for what your hormones were telling you last night. — Paul Russell

Did one learn or was one shaped? — Paul Russell

Does everybody always have to be on the prowl for love? — Paul Russell

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

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

Absolutely, love matters," she reiterated. "We forget that at our own risk. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having without having: it's possible, isn't it, that that's worse than not having at all? — Paul Russell

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

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

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

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

The world is what it is. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

What bound people together was so fragile. — Paul Russell

On rooftops overlooking each crossing, Cossacks had begun setting up machine guns. — Paul Russell

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

The presence of the policeman around the corner is the only thing that keeps us civilised. — Paul Russell

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. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

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

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

Was this what was called falling in love, this wayward glimpse of another person's soul? — Paul Russell

There must have been a time, before Internet porn, when there wasn't a script. Nowadays, everybody knows exactly how sex is supposed to go. — Paul Russell

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

The slippery slope was everywhere. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

She simply could not imagine lives ending so soon. Oh, you poor young men, she thought wildly. — Paul Russell

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

Sometimes Anatole wonders just where the elusive point is, where you stop being sane. — Paul Russell

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end. — Paul Russell

There was always something sly about any act of education. Eve had learned that in the garden. — Paul Russell

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

She thinks about the salt point, that mysterious, elusive moment of change. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

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

If it was to be a time of momentous changes, then why not allow oneself to be swept along? — Paul Russell

Leigh stands there, not so much a figure to scare crows as to beckon doves. — Paul Russell

God answers every prayer, Rabbi Schumann once told him, years ago. Mostly His answer is 'no'. — Paul Russell

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

The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility. — Paul Russell

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

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

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

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

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

Dresden, which I am told presents no military or industrial targets whatsoever for the RAF. — Paul Russell

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

We should all be merely animals. As humans, there are miseries nothing can put us out of. — Paul Russell