“According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next.”

“The root of heterosexual fear of male homosexuality is in the fact that anyone might be gay. Straight men aren't threatened by a flamboyant faggot because they know they aren't like that; they're threatened by a guy who's just like they are who turns out to be queer.”

“Amalfitano remembered a time when he believed that nothing happened by chance, everything happened for some reason, but when was that time? he couldn't remember, all he could remember was that at some point thiw was what he believed...”

“When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and--the crowning touch-- a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor.”

“Tiffs among the faggots were apparently the stuff of quiet merriment.”

“In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”

“For Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that "night of the soul" the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace.”