Jarek

“Guy suddenly wanted to scald his face, gain fifty pounds, shear his hair. He was sick of his beauty, his “eternal” beauty. People thought he was purer, more intelligent, kinder, nobler than he was because they ascribed all these virtues to him. What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic? If they saw him for what he really was – empty-headed, vicieux (how did you translate that? “Riddled with vices?”), narcisse? Used to being indulged and pursued, terrified he’d outlive his fatal appeal and yet longing to be free of it?”
― Edmund White, Our Young Man

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

“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

“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