Jarek

“Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“I don’t think we’re as far apart as you say. I mean, when the shit comes down, we’ll both be on the same side of the barricades.’
‘The shit is already down.’
‘I mean when people are dying in the streets.’
‘Kate, people are dying in the streets. It’s not the movies, where the world divides into freedom fighters and brownshirts. Here in New York City there are people who take action and people who do nothing. Doing nothing is a position. It means giving approval without having actively to say so.”
― Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble

“There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so...”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours