Quotes from Andrew Holleran

Florida was where they lived, where I kept coming back, though nobody asked me questions anymore about what I was doing. One day, when I was sitting in the back seat of the car as we were waiting for a railroad train to go by on our way to the mall, my mother turned back to me and said, apropos of something I forget, "You are a separate person, you know," but I felt I wasn't. I couldn't get away from them, which is why I kept coming back to Florida.

Can one waste a life?

Also you would have to make your novel very sad—the world demands that gay life, like the life of the Very Rich, be ultimately sad,

You fell in love with him right away: with his fine blue eyes, his moustache, his red hooded sweat shirt and tennis sneakers, his slender form, his chesthut hair, the way he looked at you with that blend of humor, intelligence, and relaxed confidence.

When the American novelist Howard Sturgis lay on his deathbed he was cared for so solicitously by his life partner that at one point Sturgis had to remind him, "A watched pot never boils"—surely one of the wittiest comments ever made while dying, unless you consider what the socialite Drue Heinz said when nearing the end—"They won't even let you take a book"—or the emperor Vespasian, who remarked on his deathbed, "I think I am turning into a god.

When I got home, the neighborhood would be so quiet that after a few weeks in other places, I'd want to yell at all the silent houses I drove past: What are you doing in there? Eating, shitting, watching TV—writing novels?

He's so lonely and such a gentleman. The old-fashioned kind, who would gladly fight a duel over you. He'll buy you a townhouse here, darling, and just fly up every month or so for some medical conference, take you to the best parties, and then fuck you to oblivion in the den afterward.

But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at that sparkling snowfall. That was it. That was Malone - standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.

He wandered the streets and parks with the deep pleasure of someone who is saying good-bye to a place, which, once it has been relegated to the past, now seems especially touching.

Love is, after all, my darlings, all anticipation and imagination, and when they finally met they would say something perfectly mundane!

They made love much later on a mattress in the living room, as the cries of children playing in the street echoed around them, and when Malone left he had fallen in love; not with the young man, but the thought of him in the bathtub with his candles reading books of anatomy; and when Malone went to see him the next time, he simply sat with him in the bathroom and did not even ask to make love.

Why dangerous?" said his tutee. "Dangerous because you may lose your heart," he said, standing up. "Or mind. Or reputation. Or contact lenses.

It is a fact seldom observed that after a certain age a single man is a creature no one has a place for

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.

She talked about the loveliness of Saigon in the twenties. She talked of the beaches they had found on little islands in the Seychelles, as the dusk gathered in the deep garden shaded by towering oaks, embalmed with the scent of gardenias and crape myrtle.

They were the most romantic creatures in the city in that room. If their days were spent in banks and office buildings, no matter: Their true lives began when they walked through this door—and were baptized into a deeper faith, as if brought to life by miraculous immersion. They lived only for the night.

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.

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.

What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed? For this dreary round of amusing insincerity? This filthy bourgeois society that the Aristotelians have foisted upon us? No, we may still choose to live like gods, like poets. Which brings us down to dancing. Yes," he said, turning to Malone, "that is all that's left when love has gone.

you'll have to forgive me, darling, I am old-fashioned, I believe in General Motors and the clarity of the gods . . .