The Coming Storm Quotes

“Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Better to burn than to rot.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“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.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“I’ll put it to you simply: love is the enemy. That’s my conclusion. We should all live in our little monk cells and never venture out ...”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Waiting, he thought, was the most miserable condition a man could find himself in. His whole life, he had been waiting for one thing or another.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Anarchy raised its seductive head. He could do anything; there was nothing that was not allowed.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“The damage love does when love goes astray. And did it ever, given half a chance, fail to wander?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“A long-simmering resentment against the world can burn off more calories than you might imagine.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“And anyway, never, never apologise the morning after for what your hormones were telling you last night.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Did one learn or was one shaped?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“You know you've got my support", Reid told him. "Whatever difficult decisions you need to make. All I would ask is that you be alert to..." For a moment he seemed at a loss.

"To what?" Louis said impatiently.

Reid picked up a votive candle from the dresser top and observed its flickering light. "The shimmer of things," he said. "The spirit and not the letter.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“When you get right down to it, we don’t ever want to know one another too well. We want there to be that mystery. Where there’s mystery, there’s hope.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Haven’t you ever gotten carried away and done something totally spur of the moment like that?”
“Everybody gets carried away from time to time,” Tracy told the boy who had carried him away.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“What was inside him would never go away. What had happened would never not have happened.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything’s mixed. There’s no absolute good and there’s no absolute evil. There’s just a lot of confusion.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“You’re the enemy. You’re the one who’s going to defeat yourself.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Does everybody always have to be on the prowl for love?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“I’m talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“People always had one kind of animal or another inside them.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Louis thought he would be all for a back-to-the-basics drive in education: a teacher, an olive tree, a bit of midday wine (the Greeks had watered theirs down to keep their heads lucid), and, last but not least, six or seven eager and receptive youths seated at one’s feet.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“As long as we do violence to other animals, we’ll keep on doing violence to ourselves.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“If it was to be a time of momentous changes, then why not allow oneself to be swept along?”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“Her heart, she had discovered in the last half year, was of durable stuff. You could test its mettle with a hammer.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm