Alan Hollinghurst

“And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.”

“The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference.”

“Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.”

“To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.”

“ 'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.”

“...but he felt the relief of being alone as well...the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure.”

“Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour''Well, it's bloody close...''Well, they often are....”

“He somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty.”

“He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.”

“It was the time of year when the atmosphere streamed with unexpected hints and memories, and a paradoxical sense of renewal.”

“There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had”

“Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.”

“On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down.”

“She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.”

“she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.”

“The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.”

“Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.”

“Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.”

“All families are silly in their own way.”

“I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.”

“And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.”

“After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. “What have you found there?” said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. “Ah, you’re a Trollope man, are you?” “I’m not sure I am, really,” said Nick. “I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his ‘great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters’?” Lord Kessler paid a moment’s wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, “Oh, Trollope’s good. He’s very good on money.” “Oh…yes…” said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. “To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.” “No, this one is pretty good,” Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage.”

“I can’t bear the smell of cigars, can you?” said Lady Partridge. “Lionel hates it too,” murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men’s tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows.”

“...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.”