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"The women round her were talking excitedly with a familiarity of the procedure and a pleasure that Dot found frightening. They were like flies round a dead dog. They went to murder trials like she went to the cinema. They were enjoying Reggie’s horrible death, it thrilled them. It made her sick."

"He began to daydream about himself and Reggie on board ship. They’d probably have to scrub decks, and they would sleep in hammocks. Did sailors really sleep in hammocks? Or was that just in films? And they would go ashore in exotic places and sometimes be at sea for weeks on end. He thought he would feel really safe if he and Reggie were together at sea. No one could take Reggie away from him then."

"Horrified, his mouth touched hers, and her lips seemed to grow like the fleshy tentacles of a sea anemone and draw him into the wet, dark, devouring cavity within."

"He preferred the Victorian crumbling to the contemporary gloss."

"Dick liked to feel the money fat in his pocket. Then he could go and buy a suit or shoes or go drinking. Better than Dad’s pint on a Sunday. It was living."

"The reporter always gets the blame, but the real culprits are the proprietors and editors who relentlessly pursue the trivial and the sordid, while protesting that they are shocked by what they have to print."

"Fortunately for them, most of the reporters I knew were not frustrated writers swimming against the tide; they were workmen who happened to use words instead of nuts and bolts or bricks."

"If all the homosexuals in this country were to be rounded up and imprisoned, they would fill the existing gaols thirty times over."

"It was a strange land in which to begin one’s adult life; a vast, hot and ugly country which seemed to tolerate its inhabitants, black and white, merely as an elephant tolerates flies."

"There were plenty of boys who fitted the description. I used to watch them rowing on the river, handsome, muscular and slightly dim, as unapproachable as gods. I would run to hold their boats as they embarked, hoping that one of them would speak to me. But it was quite impossible."

"Everywhere he goes, he sees other men like himself, forbidden by the law to give any physical expression to their desires. It is not surprising that he should seek a partner among them, so that together they may build a shelter against the hostile world."

"If it was possible for me to become like them I should do so; and nothing would be easier for me than to assume a superficial normality, get married and perhaps have a family. This would, however, be at best dishonest, because I should be running away from my own problem, and at worst it would be cruel, because I should run the risk of making two people unhappy instead of one."

"I do not pity myself, and I do not ask for pity. If there is bitterness in this book, I hope it will be the bitterness of medicine, not of poison."

"‘I did not believe such things could happen in England,’ Wildeblood writes, ‘until they happened to me.’"

"Against the Law is, itself, a leading witness in gay history."

"This is a book that leaves a scar on the memory."

pausing for now!

"Once he would have crawled to hear her speak to him with such tenderness. Such concern." AYOOOO????

"—though Az knew that was a fool’s dream. As most of his dreams turned out to be."

"But there he was, shock and horror blatant on his bloodied face. It melted into something close to victory."

"The cold phantom hand of the Monastery’s danger zone curls around his waist."

"Last night Jay dreamed of his father’s bones, buttery in a nest of purple kelp, bejeweled with red sea slugs like holiday lights. The bones were soft in his hands, a gentle touch he never got from Mitt and therefore never gave back. He slid them against his cheek. He kissed them. He woke up tasting marrow."

"Jay hates agreeing with his father on anything; each time is an infection. But discharging his passed down distrust of the coast guard would be like extracting his own spleen."

"Like the sardine factory ruins on the Row itself, Steinbeck’s novel evokes a simpler, pitiless time. Qualities Mitt Gardiner values. To him, modern Monterey is a boil seeping tourist pus over a coastline that should have been left to the fish-stinking folk who worked it."

"But for Enid, her mother is only a wound, scabbing over, but never healing completely."

"Her heart fills with roiling black terror. Her whole life depends on being unclockable. And this man, this random man she only just met, has the nuclear codes to her entire existence, one button away from denotating the whole thing to oblivion. She should deny it, slap him across the face, walk out and never look back, pay any price for his silence, or kill him with her bares hands."

"It could be some sort of passing virus that we didn’t test for.”

"A baby, a beautiful new life, will cast away the last cobwebs of grief and maybe he can return to the man he used to be. He can be normal again."

"She curses a cruel God that some floozy can so easily produce something so pure, so magical, so full of boundless love, while her own body produces nothing but mucus and feces. She can feel Christine’s eyes on her, fraternizing with a terrorist."

"She also knows that without another child, they are still stuck in a pale imitation of his original family—a mom, a dad, and a daughter, with Martha slotted in where his first wife once was. A baby would mark a totally new family arrangement, one unblemished by death."