Paul Russell quotes:

The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives.

When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.

Whose fine idea had it been, on the Olympian heights or deep in the bowel-dark underworld, to condemn us to the messy, intractable burden of bodies, the sheer tedium of our confinement in the flesh?

Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?

Anarchy raised its seductive head. He could do anything; there was nothing that was not allowed.

Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.

I think good conversation is really the best form of sex.

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

Her heart, she had discovered in the last half year, was of durable stuff. You could test its mettle with a hammer.

She simply could not imagine lives ending so soon. Oh, you poor young men, she thought wildly.

Were archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

People always knew more than you gave them credit for. Perhaps, in the end, no one had any secrets at all.