But remember now: all love does ever rightly show humanity our tenderness.
. . .
[W]hat worth is a blessing to a working man? For an ignorant heathen whoring bastard working Irish man?
. . .
Well it may so be a vocation isn’t like that. It may so be a vocation is like a friend you might make. You don’t choose a friend. A friend would come to you. And you don’t turn him out, no matter what others would say. You’re only too thankful if you found him.
. . .
It is not their despising that concerns us. It is your own.
. . .
Don’t be bitter, son. There’s bitterness enough in the world.
. . .
One is never alone with the ghost of a friend.
. . .
What, then, are the virtues advanced by friendship? MacMurrough replied that they were surely divers and legion; but that the cardinal virtue of friendship must be selflessness.
. . .
—Friendship tending to love may tend to desire, said Scrotes.
—Yes, but desire was there anyway. We all desired. We were riven with it. The monks policed friendship but all they effected was a sexual abandon. Instead of fumbling with love, we fumbled in the dark.
. . .
“And you think I’d make a good teacher?”
“Never doubt it. And sure what better employment? Helping your fellow man to get on in the world—you’d be proud of a job like that. The only job for you, old pal.”
. . .
His beauty claimed his defects for the part of him that made it possible, made him true.
. . .
The struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and cast a shadow its own in the sun. —Help these boys build a nation their own. Ransack the histories for clues to their past. Plunder the literatures for words they can speak. And should you encounter an ancient tribe whose customs, however dimly, cast light on their hearts, tell them that tale; and you shall name the unspeakable names of your kind, and in that naming, in each such telling, they will falter a step to the light.
. . .
What country is that without a friend in it?
. . .
Don’t you know when you love someone you don’t need to do anything at all?
. . .
For we live as angels among the Sodomites. And every day the crowd finds some one of us out. I know their lewd calls and their obscene gestures. I know their mockery that bides their temper’s loss. I have seen in lanes and alleys of Piccadilly faces streaked with their spit and piss, and mouths they have bloodied with boots and blows. For rarely an angel finds a Lot to house him. And I would not my boy should suffer so.
. . .
[W]e’re extraordinary people. We must do extraordinary things.
. . .
How empty it would be if we didn’t know—it’s like a secret really—didn’t know how we could be.
