Michala

“I mean," Rupert looked up at me cogiatively, "almost everyone is a homosexual, aren't they? Boys, I mean."
"I sometimes think so," I hedged.
"Is Grandpa one?"
"Good heavens, no," I protested.
"Am I one?"Rupert asked intently.
"It's a bit early to say yet, old fellow. But you could be, you know."
"Goody!" he squealed, banging his heels against the front of the sofa again. "Then I can come and live with you.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“... We were just having a talk about homosexuality."
"He is frightfully interested in that at the moment, although he can't have the least idea what it is - can he? It must be the effect of his overbearing and possessive mum. Odd what little children get up to; I was a committed transvestite at his age. But that seemed to get it out of the system," he added hastily.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka