Paul Russell > Quotes

“Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“It is Halloween,” he explains coyly. “I wanted to come out as something beautiful. None of this witch stuff for me. My God, don’t we spend our whole life as witches?”
― Paul Russell, The Salt Point

“Better to burn than to rot.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Waiting, he thought, was the most miserable condition a man could find himself in. His whole life, he had been waiting for one thing or another.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“I’ll put it to you simply: love is the enemy. That’s my conclusion. We should all live in our little monk cells and never venture out ...”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Anarchy raised its seductive head. He could do anything; there was nothing that was not allowed.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.”
― Paul Russell, Immaculate Blue

“And anyway, never, never apologise the morning after for what your hormones were telling you last night.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Nobody disappears completely anymore. The only thing that’s disappeared is privacy, which is never coming back. And which is probably a good thing. Why should anything be private? No hiding, no guilt, no shame. Just a completely transparent world.”
― Paul Russell, Immaculate Blue

“You know you've got my support", Reid told him. "Whatever difficult decisions you need to make. All I would ask is that you be alert to..." For a moment he seemed at a loss.

"To what?" Louis said impatiently.

Reid picked up a votive candle from the dresser top and observed its flickering light. "The shimmer of things," he said. "The spirit and not the letter.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“The damage love does when love goes astray. And did it ever, given half a chance, fail to wander?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Did one learn or was one shaped?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“A long-simmering resentment against the world can burn off more calories than you might imagine.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Is that racist – I mean, to be attracted to a type? Probably, but what you want is what you want, right? Your dick doesn’t know fuck about political correctness, even if the rest of you is pretty well-versed.”
― Paul Russell, Immaculate Blue

“Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, last but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one’s feet.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one’s whole life in irreversible conflagration.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“People always had one kind of animal or another inside them.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“There was always something sly about any act of education. Eve had learned that in the garden.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“But it’s not real life. It’s just America.”
― Paul Russell, Immaculate Blue

“Does everybody always have to be on the prowl for love?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“If it was to be a time of momentous changes, then why not allow oneself to be swept along?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything’s mixed. There’s no absolute good and there’s no absolute evil. There’s just a lot of confusion.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“This whole fucking country’s got it great and doesn’t even know it. Why? Because the price for having it so great gets paid somewhere else, by somebody else, where you don’t have to see it. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s the fucking key to the whole shit system. Stay blind, stay deaf.”
― Paul Russell, Immaculate Blue