Paul Russell

“I’m talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.”

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

“The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Chris is a little ashamed of having once fallen for him: it makes him sad how everything changes, how ruthless the heart can be.”