They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn’t throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.
Living for beauty is all very fine, but it’s a hard regimen and burns up the heart very quickly.
You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order.
He did not wish to be the man to whom nothing was ever to happen.
A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral—everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief.
The more beautiful the sky, the more hopeless the neighborhood.
Malone had been raised by a lady both Irish and Catholic, in a good bourgeois home in which careless table manners were a sin, much less this storm in his heart.
Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures . . . a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to.
The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.
You know, when people who were once religious no longer believe in God, they never really change; they just go on, hunting for the ecstatic food, trying to satisfy that hunger.
Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, longed for, the face shatters, every time.
[…] and the only reason he came out at all, during that period after he left Frankie, when he wanted to go away and hide forever, was the crazy compulsion with which we resolved all the tangled impulses of our lives—the need to dance.
He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost.
Homosexuality is like a boarding school in which there are no vacations.
They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.
There was a moment of silence and then Sutherland breathed, “But, darling! Gossip is the food of the gods.