While England Sleeps Quotes

“I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men.

Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond.

Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“La relación entre Edward y yo fue una historia típica que, atrapada en la guerra, se volvió trágica...pero eso también es una historia típica”
― David Leavitt, Mientras Inglaterra duerme

“I no longer regret that I will never again breathe the wet air of London, with its scent of baking bread. Nor do I waste my time wondering what our lives might have been like had Edward survived the crossing. I cannot change the past, and even if I could, I’m not sure I’d want to. And yet he does not leave me. Indeed, sometimes, when I’m driving down the freeway, or along Sunset Boulevard, he comes back; just appears there, in the passenger seat of my car.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“I was an old poofter with money, a relic of prewar England washed ashore on the beaches of Malibu. A dinosaur.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“and while it would be incorrect to characterize our relationship as a grand passion, there was between us an easiness, a companionability, that in my opinion is a far rarer commodity.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“And if you loved this boy, if you are his survivor as well as his killer, then you must sacrifice the memory of your love. You must bury grief if guilt is to be endured. As I did, in Los Angeles, for thirty-one years.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Thus you run away from the pain inflicters, you go to a new place and, because it is new, try to convince yourself that the old place no longer exists; that distance erases history; that the boy who died because of you belonged only to your imagination and therefore never died, and therefore his mother, his sisters, his survivors, survive no one, nothing; they are just people getting on with their lives.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“The human capacity for pain being limited, you find you can’t inflict nearly so much on yourself as you can on someone else (or as someone else can on you).”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Ask the hit-and-run driver, the nurse who injects her patient with the wrong hypodermic, the mother who has accidentally smothered her infant: they will tell you that after the first few years, you learn to live with blame.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Those a generation ahead of us, who had grown up under the watchful eye of the elderly Queen Victoria, proved less resilient. They retreated to country houses, those that still stood, heating what rooms they could afford to heat. Or they sought refuge in rivers. Or, like Stephen Tennant, the brightest of the bright young things, in pink furniture, mirrors, maquillage. Became anachronisms. Resistance to change can produce that kind of madness.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Who touches the body, however fleetingly, also touches the soul.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“No. No, I didn’t. And I agree with you, pledges to a cause cannot be taken lightly. But what if a boy takes that pledge rashly – without thinking it through? What if there were other factors involved? Things that were going on at home that had nothing to do with the war but that might have prompted him to do something on the spur of the moment, something he’d later regret?”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“My friend, you’re too hard on yourself,” Josep said. “Yes, you made a mistake. But consider all you’ve done. You’ve come all this way for him. I would call that extraordinary. Brave, in fact.” He extinguished his cigarette. “As for making love, what choice do we have, in these times? If you don’t mind my saying so, you did it grievously, almost as if you were seeking an exorcism. And that, I think, is something he would understand.” Josep left soon after that. I never saw him again. I can’t tell you if he died in battle, or survived and married, if he’s a famous poet now, or a laborer, or a judge. So why is it that he survives so vividly in my memory – this boy I knew only for a night?”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Then, once again, he started moving. He slid out and eased in again and hit something, some region of fire. Suddenly there was sensation, a flaring pleasure that seemed to radiate out in waves, that seemed initially to exist alongside the pain I was feeling, and then, miraculously, seemed part of the pain, and then swallowed the pain up. My eyes bulged out, my mouth opened into an uncontrollable shout. I understood, suddenly, what had driven Edward so mad those times I’d done it to him; it was this, this quadrant of pleasure hidden deep up inside. And Josep thrust harder, and with each thrust the radiating pleasure revived, flailing my limbs and rolling my head and twitching the length of my cock until it seemed I might come from it, from this thrusting, I might not even have to touch myself or be touched by him, but I did not want to come, I wanted this to last, I wanted to say things, filthy things, utter words I’d never uttered, and I did, I said, “Fuck me,” I said, “Come inside me,” and with a loud shout Josep thrust one final time and the warm flood of his semen was pouring down my legs like tears.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“I realize I left England rather suddenly, and in doing so no doubt caused you distress. Suffice it to say that I had the misfortune to come upon your journal and commit the unpardonable sin of reading it. No doubt by now you and Miss Archibald are engaged and I am the last thing on your mind. Nonetheless I am facing a difficult dilemma and know no one else who might be able to help me find a way out of it.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“The facts: Edward was an adult, capable of making his own decisions. His genuine political convictions could not be underestimated as a motive for joining the brigade; nor could Northrop’s influence. Edward was a hero, braver and better than I. Risking his life because of Spain was democracy’s last best hope. Just as Edward was my last best hope. And if I hadn’t fucked Philippa, gone cottaging, lied to him, left the journal about – what else? – he would have gone anyway, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he? I managed, on certain days, almost to convince myself of it.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“«Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia».”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps

“Everyone had gone to school with someone’s brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent.”
― David Leavitt, While England Sleeps