Paul Russell, The Coming Storm Quotes
If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?
People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all.
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.
There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all.
Despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one’s whole life in irreversible conflagration.
Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.
Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.
As long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves.
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.
Absolutely, love matters, ” she reiterated. “We forget that at our own risk.
The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart.
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.
Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?
Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.
It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.
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 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.
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.
