Quotes from Alan Hollinghurst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

All families are silly in their own way.

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

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

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicable nothing

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.

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

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.

like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light.

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

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.

Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.

He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.