Tom

“Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. (“It is easier to die than to move,” she wrote Augusta once; “at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.”)”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward—in contrast with love—is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.”
― Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art

“Chris’s willowy fingers dug into his thighs and hers closed over his ears and he stopped hearing the soup sound of her mouth and felt the brief pain of her teeth nipping the drawn foreskin and the throb of his groin pumping the teeming fluid into her throat, stopping her gentle voice and dripping from her chords that sung the music of her lonely heart. Her hair lay athwart in clean strands on his body and for the next silent minute he was the sanest man on earth, bled of his seed, rid of his mind.”
― J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man

“As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart