David Leavitt > Quotes

“Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.”
― David Leavitt, Collected Stories

“When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.”
― David Leavitt

“I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Hope had stolen into his life just as he was growing comfortable with despair.”
― David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

“We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?”
― David Leavitt, The Two Hotel Francforts

“Foi a bordo do Elevador da Bica que Edward me disse pela primeira vez que Iris era católica.
- Desconfio que a sua infância foi passada do seguinte modo - disse ele. - Com as freiras a darem-lhe pequenas penitências para cumprir. Mas, mal cumpria a primeira volta, já tinha cometido novo pecado. E assim para todo o sempre.
- Ela ainda é praticante?
- Já não. Desistiu quando casou comigo. Dos dogmas da fé, ainda que não dos terrores. Os terrores, esses são mais difíceis de nos vermos livres deles.”
― David Leavitt

“She looked toward the window, smiling away her life”
― David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

“Philip understood that there were people in the world like Eliot for whom love and sex came easy, without active solicitation, like a strong wind to which they had only to turn their faces and it would blow over them. He also understood that he was not one of those people. Instead, he seemed always to be eking out signals, interpreting glances, trying to extract some knowledge of another person's feelings from the most trivial conversations. Nothing came easy for him, and more often than not, nothing came of any of his efforts.”
― David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

“Sex, my darling, is often the least important part of a passion. You'll learn that when you get older. - Maria Luisa (Tushi) Strauss”
― David Leavitt, The Page Turner: A Compelling LGBTQ Literary Novel of Piano, Passion, and Transformative Love

“What, in watching a bunch of so-called analysts sitting around a table with empty coffee mugs, congratulating each other on agreeing with each other? The news isn’t news anymore, it’s just pompous opinionating, the purpose of which is to keep us anxious, because these people, these newspeople, even your beloved Rachel Maddow, they know that as long as they can keep us anxious, as long as they dangle the carrot of consolation in front of us, they’ve got us hooked. They’re no different than the French papers in 1940, just more sophisticated. And more venal.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“Cautiously his foot explored, wiggled as it could, and finally felt warm flesh under the pants leg.”
― David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

“La relación entre Edward y yo fue una historia típica que, atrapada en la guerra, se volvió trágica...pero eso también es una historia típica”
― David Leavitt, Mientras Inglaterra duerme

“Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing. And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done." -David Leavitt, "Partition," _The Indian Clerk_”
― David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk

“Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you.”
― David Leavitt

“To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men.

Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond.

Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“having some warm and fuzzy impulse to make the world a better place isn’t enough. It doesn’t make you an artist. What’s been lost is any appreciation of virtuosity, of flair.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Quizá esté en la naturaleza de la amistad, en cuanto opuesta al amor, que la consideremos una continuidad que no hay que alimentar y de la que nos alejemos cuanto nos apetece, convencidos de que, al igual que el afecto de nuestra madre, estará allí para recibirnos en el momento en que regresemos. Pero, ay, no es lo que ocurre con la amistad, que a la postre se asemeja más al amor de lo que la mayoría de la gente admite.”
― David Leavitt, Martin Bauman: or, A Sure Thing

“—Lo que más me aterra en este mundo —le dice Neil a Wayne— es la posibilidad de que le destroces la vida a alguien sin tú saberlo. O incluso de que le cambies la vida. Detesto pensar que uno puede tener ese poder, yo sería una madre deplorable.”
― David Leavitt, Family Dancing: Stories

“Far from negating randomness, they confirm it. Hence 331, 3331, 33331, 333331, and 3333331 are prime, but 33333331 is not.”
― David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk

“It’s one thing to refuse an invitation,” Aaron said, “another to be told you’ll never get one.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“«Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia».”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“I was an old poofter with money, a relic of prewar England washed ashore on the beaches of Malibu. A dinosaur.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Nor should it be assumed that machines are not capable of deception. On the contrary, the criticism “that a machine cannot have much diversity of behaviour is just a way of saying that it cannot have much storage capacity.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Everyone had gone to school with someone’s brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Can a machine, educated through a system of reward and punishment, be said to be able to think? Are children, when they cry or laugh, revealing some spark of soul that distinguishes them from machines, or simply following “rules of behavior” with which we as spectators empathize because we are familiar with them? Or to put it another way, does asking whether computers think require us to ask, as well, whether humans compute?”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Ask the hit-and-run driver, the nurse who injects her patient with the wrong hypodermic, the mother who has accidentally smothered her infant: they will tell you that after the first few years, you learn to live with blame.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“What’s wrong with Barbara Kingsolver?” Eva asked. “She is the embodiment of liberal piety at its most middlebrow and tendentious. Her novels are the beef ribs of fiction.”
― David Leavitt, Shelter in Place

“No. No, I didn’t. And I agree with you, pledges to a cause cannot be taken lightly. But what if a boy takes that pledge rashly – without thinking it through? What if there were other factors involved? Things that were going on at home that had nothing to do with the war but that might have prompted him to do something on the spur of the moment, something he’d later regret?”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps