The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst

to have so many failures required a high rate of preliminary success.

“You recall the branches of arithmetic, Nick? Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision … ?”

He loved the hard self-confidence of his date; and at the same time, in his silent, superior way, he thought he heard how each little brag was the outward denial of an inner doubt.

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process,”

Critics had already described Scarface as “operatic,” which perhaps was only their way of saying it was Latin, noisy and bombastic.

Perhaps being old friends didn’t mean very much, they shared assumptions rather than lives.

How cars themselves changed as they aged; at first they were possibilities made solid and fast, agents of dreams that kept a glint of dreams about them, a keen narcotic smell; then slowly they disclosed their unguessed quaintness and clumsiness, they seemed to fade into the dim disgrace between one fashion and another.

“I know people take it very personally when they find they’ve been kept out of a secret. But really secrets are sort of impersonal. They’re simply things that can’t be told, irrespective of who they can’t be told to.”