Quotes from Andrew Holleran

They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.

Try not to be self-conscious […] or so critical. Don't mope around looking for someone else to make you happy, and remember that the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love and find it very difficult to love anyone merely human, which we unfortunately happen to be.

Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.

The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.

We want not only to be loved, but to be loved alone.

When you put something down that happened, people often don't believe it; whereas, you can make up anything, and people assume it must have happened to you.

Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had.

Dreams decompose, darling, <...> like anything else. And they give off gases, some of which are poisonous and all of which are unpleasant, and so one goes away from the place in which the dreams were dreamed, and are now decomposing before your very eyes. Otherwise, you might die, dear, of monoxide poisoning.

Witty people came out in autumn; beauties in July.

Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac.

Living for beauty is all very fine, but it's a hard regimen and burns up the heart very quickly.

If your friends don't want your boyfriend, what's the point?

I'll go live in the woods," said Malone. "You'll be lonely," said Sutherland. "Even Thoreau went to town in the afternoon to gossip.

The more beautiful the sky, the more hopeless the neighborhood.

You are doomed to a life that will repeat itself again and again, as do all lives—for lives are static things, readings of already written papers—but whereas some men are fortunate to repeat a good pattern, others have the opposite luck—and you can surely see by now that your life is doomed to this same humiliation, endlessly repeated.

Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, longed for, the face shatters, every time.

Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures . . . a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to.

Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn't last beyond the morning, then know I love you.

I couldn't not write. Sometimes I ask myself, How do people get through life without writing? I write to calm anxiety, to process pain. Writing to me is reflection.

especially the young ones, come into the canyon for the first time, quiet as deer, some of them, coming to your hand for salt: their dark eyes wide and gleaming with the wonder and the fear we had all felt at seeing for the first time life as our dreams had always imagined it… at seeing so many people with whom they could fall in love. The old enchantment composed of lights, music, people was transfixing them for the first time, and it made their faces even more touching.

They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn't throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.

There are three lies in life," Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to supervise. "One, the check is in the mail. Two, I will not come in your mouth. And three, all Puerto Ricans have big cocks," he said.

He did not wish to be the man to whom nothing was ever to happen.

A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral—everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief.