Quotes from The Line of Beauty

“He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“All families are silly in their own way.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour'
'Well, it's bloody close...'
'Well, they often are....”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“...but he felt the relief of being alone as well...the forgotten solitude which measures and verifies the strength of an affair, and which, being temporary, is a kind of pleasure.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“They had kissed the first time they did coke together, their first kiss, Wani’s mouth sour with wine, his tongue darting, his eyes timidly closed. Each time after that was a re-enactment of a thrilling beginning. Anything seemed possible – the world was not only doable, conquerable, but lovable: it showed its weaknesses and you knew it would submit to you. You saw your own charm reflected in its eyes. Nick stood and kissed Wani in the middle of the room – two or three heavenly minutes that had been waiting to happen, a glowing collision, a secret rift in the end of the day.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. “What have you found there?” said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. “Ah, you’re a Trollope man, are you?”

“I’m not sure I am, really,” said Nick. “I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his ‘great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters’?”

Lord Kessler paid a moment’s wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, “Oh, Trollope’s good. He’s very good on money.”

“Oh…yes…” said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. “To be honest, there’s a lot of him I haven’t yet read.”

“No, this one is pretty good,” Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“I can’t bear the smell of cigars, can you?” said Lady Partridge.

“Lionel hates it too,” murmured Rachel. As did Nick, to whom the dry lavatorial stench of cigars signified the inexplicable confidence of other men’s tastes and habits, and their readiness to impose them on their fellows.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“ 'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, ...”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“You can drive, Nick,' and threw them over to him. It was typical of Wani to dress up a command
as a treat.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“And something else came back, from that later first morning at Kensington Park Gardens: a sense that the house was not only an enhancement of Toby's interest but a compensation for his lack of it.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“...like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“Something happened when you looked in the mirror together. You asked it, as always, a question, and you asked each other something too; and the space, shadowy but glossy, the further room in which you found yourself, as if on a stage, vibrated with ironies and sentimental admissions.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“Hello, Badger,’ said Nick, still self-conscious at teasing a virtual stranger about the yellow-grey stripe in his dark hair, at having to enrol in the family cult of Badger as a character, but finding it easier after all than the sober, the critical, the almost hostile-sounding ‘Derek’. Badger in turn was clearly puzzled by Nick’s presence in his old friend’s house and made facetious attempts at understanding him. It was a part of his general mischief – he lurched about all day, asked leading questions, rubbed up old scandals and scratched beadily for new ones.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“older vowels were showing through as he said that it was “awfully good of” his parents to have tolerated him.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“He knew he was giving off the mischievous contentment of someone left behind for an afternoon, sleepy hints that he might have got up to something but in fact had done the more enviable and inexplicable nothing”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“It’s always his big day these days. He hardly has a small one.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

“But of course he had never done more than hug Toby and kiss him on the cheek; he had twice had a peep at his penis at a college urinal. Here, in a tiny flat in unknown Willesden, he was talking to the mother of the man who called him not only a ‘damn good fuck’ but also a ‘hot little cocksucker’ with ‘a first-class degree in arse-licking’. Which clearly was way beyond hugging and peeping. Nick gazed at her in a trance of revelation and gratitude. And”
― Alan Hollinghurst, quote from The Line of Beauty

About the author

Popular quotes

“A real man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led. Clearly,”
― Theodore Dreiser, quote from The Financier

“I might grow old in Brisbane, but I would never grow up.”
― David Malouf, quote from Johnno

“One of the previous Kings of the Enchanted Forest had been very fond of sweeping up and down staircases in a long velvet robe and his best crown, so he had added stairs wherever he thought there was room”
― Patricia C. Wrede, quote from Searching for Dragons

“Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!” So God granted him what he requested. (1 Chronicles 4:9-10)”
― Bruce H. Wilkinson, quote from The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life

“Sometimes I think that love is one big fairy tale. I wonder if people who say they are in love, if – really – they’ve just talked themselves into it. They want it so badly, they kind of make it happen. They fake it until they start believing their own story. Maybe that’s just sour grapes or something. Maybe because it doesn’t happen to me, I don’t want to think it happens to anyone else.”
― Elizabeth Chandler, quote from Summer in the City

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.