The Line of Beauty

He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

All families are silly in their own way.

Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour' 'Well, it's bloody close...' 'Well, they often are....

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.

The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference.

Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.

...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.

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.

Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.

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.

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.

'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.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material, ...

You can drive, Nick,' and threw them over to him. It was typical of Wani to dress up a command as a treat.

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.

...like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light.

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

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.

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.

older vowels were showing through as he said that it was “awfully good of” his parents to have tolerated him.

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

It’s always his big day these days. He hardly has a small one.

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