Anthony McDonald > Quotes

“It was far better, he thought, just to get on with life yourself, to have your own adventures and make your own mistakes, without raising a banner over them that proclaimed: I'm this, or I'm that; of this party or of the other one.”
― Anthony McDonald, Adam

“When whisky talks it rarely counsels prudence.”
― Anthony McDonald, Matches in the Dark: 13 Tales of Gay Men

“It did look rather nice, actually, though it was hardly something to masturbate about.”
― Anthony McDonald, Matches in the Dark: 13 Tales of Gay Men

“I've never had a love letter before. Not from anyone. It is a most wonderful thing to receive. I realise that it makes a present to me of your life, not just your love.”
― Anthony McDonald, Getting Orlando

“Oh I don't know,' he said. 'But maybe, maybe love should be a kind of journey”
― Anthony McDonald, Adam

“Sex was like the wooden horse of Troy, he decided. How uncomplicated a gift it seemed at first, but once you had let it through the gate how many unexpected dangers might be found to have stowed themselves away inside.”
― Anthony McDonald, Adam

“Exposing impressionable young men to the glories of opera on their first evening at home with you tended to put the kiss of death on things, as Oliver, to his cost, had discovered over the years.”
― Anthony McDonald, Getting Orlando

“Are we all just lightning rods for other people's destinies? Is that what it's all about”
― Anthony McDonald, Getting Orlando

“A ship there is and she sails the sea. She’s loaded deep as deep can be. But not so deep as the love I’m in. I know not if I sink or swim.”
― Anthony McDonald, Cam Cox

“A one-night stand became a fling if you repeated things the second night, that was an easy one, a question of maths. But when did a fling metamorphose into an affair? At what stage did an affair become a relationship? And how long could even one of those be relied upon to last?”
― Anthony McDonald, Getting Orlando

“If he needed his faith and the love of his God in his dying months then he needed those things and should have them. That was more important than whether God existed, or whether the tiny speck in creation that was Tom believed in Him or not. Tom”
― Anthony McDonald, Dog Roses

“Tom & Christopher and Their Kind.”
― Anthony McDonald, The Dog in the Chapel

“Another voice, another idea. ‘Love, past a certain age, is cutting each other’s toe-nails.”
― Anthony McDonald, Adam's Star

“The real being the good that lies in the human heart,' I heard myself saying. 'The real, and the greatest good among all things,' said George, 'is love.”
― Anthony McDonald, Cam Cox

“there isn't usually a great deal of novelty to report.”
― Anthony McDonald, Gay Romance in Majorca

“I know that with Michel and me there’s a feeling that the music’s stopped now and we’re relieved to find ourselves sitting together in the same chair. We don’t want to get out of it now.”
― Anthony McDonald, Dog Roses

“You take someone to your house and have sex with them while your wife is out. Or you go to theirs and have sex with them while their partner or parents are out. I accept that not everyone has done this – but I know that a very large percentage of us have. It doesn’t seem sordid but merely high-spirited, a sign of health… Until we come to read about it in the press.”
― Anthony McDonald, The Raven and the Jackdaw

“People are attached in different ways to their partners. In different degrees, by different understandings and agreements between them. People aren't all the same. Anyway, he was grown up. It was his”
― Anthony McDonald, Seville Trilogy

“Then, as the sky became a luminous dark blue tent overhead a nightingale uttered his quiet introductory long toots. Then he began to sing. Another started up, then more and more, until it seemed that streams and rivers of silver sound were pouring through the blackness of the surrounding woods.”
― Anthony McDonald, Gay Romance in Majorca

“responsibility to protect his virtue, to honour his commitment, not mine.”
― Anthony McDonald, Seville Trilogy

“Sex was like the wooden horse of Troy, he decided. How uncomplicated a gift it seemed at first, but once you had let it through the gate how many unexpected dangers might be found to have stowed themselves away inside”
― Anthony McDonald, Adam: A Sensuous Coming of Age Tale

“Barney, but you must learn to see the difference between love and hero-worship. And between love and sex.”
― Anthony McDonald, The Raven and the Jackdaw

“and then snuggled beneath the cosy covers happily masturbating each other to climax after climax,”
― Anthony McDonald, Dog Roses

“I didn’t. Those labels didn’t seem to mean much anyway, applied to someone whose complexities I knew so intimately. Jason was simply Jason and I was just myself.”
― Anthony McDonald, The Raven and the Jackdaw

“Going this way in the early evening the sun was straight ahead of us and the forests we drove through looked almost black, except where the trees thinned out and we saw pasture between them, shining through at us with the brilliance of buttercups.”
― Anthony McDonald, Gay Romance in Majorca

“We hadn't got round to discussing whether our previous relationships had supported threesomes or not. I mean, we'd only been together two days, and that's a subject that doesn't usually come up until you've been together at least a week.”
― Anthony McDonald, Gay Romance in Majorca