101 Quotes by Paul Russell

You get exactly what you want, Anatole’s always suspected, only when you get it it’s no longer what you want, you need something else.

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

There’s always people looking the other way when the miracles take place, people who want only a good night’s sleep when the stars are dancing, comets falling, the angels leaning low out of midnight with their trumpets, their cantatas of longing.

Louis had learned to be suspicious of the word educational. It covered, after all, a multitude of sins.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

Our students didn’t used to come from such damaged families,” Louis mused. “It’s true what they say. This country really is coming apart at the seams.

Shirtless, they’d stretch out in the long grass and take the healing brunt of a noontime sun that gave no clue of the thunderheads it already, in secret, had begun to breed.

As long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves.

And Chris remembers: what they used to talk about was desire. Impossible, longing dreams. Delirious, aching confusion. That was the vital element they lived off … because it was the one thing that mattered. Not things, or achievements, or politics, or fracking or anything else: just sweet naked blameless unending desire.