Dancer from the Dance Quotes

“The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack you shot up in Sutherland's apartment, no, it wasn't any of these. It was the city, darling, it was the city, the city itself. And do you see why I had to leave? As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Try not to be self-conscious […] or so critical. Don’t mope around looking for someone else to make you happy, and remember that the vast majority of homosexuals are looking for a superman to love and find it very difficult to love anyone merely human, which we unfortunately happen to be.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“We want not only to be loved, but to be loved alone.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Dreams decompose, darling, <...> like anything else. And they give off gases, some of which are poisonous and all of which are unpleasant, and so one goes away from the place in which the dreams were dreamed, and are now decomposing before your very eyes. Otherwise, you might die, dear, of monoxide poisoning.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“But Malone was thinking now and as he watched the men lighting cigarettes for each other in the dark, having sex beneath the trees, he turned to his friend and said in a wondering voice: “Isn’t it strange that when we fall in love, this great dream we have, this extraordinary disease, the only thing in which either one of us is interested, it’s inevitably with some perfectly ordinary drip who for some reason we cannot define is the magic bearer, the magician, the one who brings all this to us. Why?”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Living for beauty is all very fine, but it’s a hard regimen and burns up the heart very quickly.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“You are doomed to a life that will repeat itself again and again, as do all lives—for lives are static things, readings of already written papers—but whereas some men are fortunate to repeat a good pattern, others have the opposite luck—and you can surely see by now that your life is doomed to this same humiliation, endlessly repeated.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Witty people came out in autumn; beauties in July.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn't last beyond the morning, then know I love you.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“We lived only to dance. What was the true characteristic of a queen, I wondered later on; and you could argue that forever. “What do we all have in common in this group?” I once asked a friend seriously, when it occurred to me how slender, how immaterial, how ephemeral the bond was that joined us; and he responded, “We all have lips.” Perhaps that is what we all had in common: no one was allowed to be serious, except about the importance of music, the glory of faces seen in the crowd. We had our songs, we had our faces! We had our web belts and painter’s jeans, our dyed tank tops and haircuts, the plaid shirts, bomber jackets, jungle fatigues, the all-important shoes.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“The more beautiful the sky, the more hopeless the neighborhood.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn’t care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, longed for, the face shatters, every time.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“I’ll go live in the woods,” said Malone.
“You’ll be lonely,” said Sutherland. “Even Thoreau went to town in the afternoon to gossip.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Also you would have to make your novel very sad—the world demands that gay life, like the life of the Very Rich, be ultimately sad,”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Love is a career with its own stages, rewards, and failures . . . a vocation as concrete as a calling in the Church, worth giving a lifetime to.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“He did not wish to be the man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“There are three lies in life,” Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to supervise. “One, the check is in the mail. Two, I will not come in your mouth. And three, all Puerto Ricans have big cocks,” he said.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style—all the things one shouldn’t throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“…especially the young ones, come into the canyon for the first time, quiet as deer, some of them, coming to your hand for salt: their dark eyes wide and gleaming with the wonder and the fear we had all felt at seeing for the first time life as our dreams had always imagined it… at seeing so many people with whom they could fall in love. The old enchantment composed of lights, music, people was transfixing them for the first time, and it made their faces even more touching.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“..And remember to ask questions, and notice everything, the orchids and the fruit flies, the children rummaging for food in piles of shit, and the ibis that flies across the moon at dusk. Let us go at least as far as the falls.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“What do you like to do? Do you like to get fucked a long time, deeply, slowly, searchingly?”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“Now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“I am in fact so depressed that last night while Bob Cjaneovic was sitting on my face, I began to think how futile life is, no matter what you do—it all ends in Death, we are given such a short time, and everything truly is, as Ecclesiastes says, Vanity, Vanity, Vanity.
Of course that only made me burrow deeper, but still—to have the thought.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance