The New Life

We must live in the future we hope to make.

You look as though you read Oscar Wilde, Mr. Relph.' 'As do you, Miss Britell.' 'We are both of us too obvious in our attachments. It is embarrassing.

The sheer madness of it rushed at him: to have hazarded his freedom for the sake of those short periods of abandon; for the slick repetitive motions of his cock. Irrumatio, fellatio, paedicatio. For these he had eschewed study, art, friendship; he had sacrificed all the comforts of a home, the dignity of a marriage.

I cannot help thinking that, if mine and Ellis's book exists, there might be men, even if it is only a handful, who read it, and see that they must never marry. Or there might be grown-up children who read it, and forgive their fathers. I don't think it is silly of me, to wish to spare people pain. The book may not change the law, not on its own, but it may spare people pain.

They have destroyed a man, who three months ago they doted on, because they are afraid of what they might learn about human nature. They have learned enough and they have turned the key on it. We are near the end of the century and are as primitive as we were at its beginning.

And this is the law! The law, that births the blackmailer, nurses him, makes him fat. The law, that turns him witness - grants him pardon, when it suits, in order to secure the guilt of the sodomite. This is the majesty of it! And the Justice, for him to say that Wilde must be dead to shame. That he had never tried a worse trial. Does he know that little children are strangled and burned by their parents? That most nights old men die bundled in doorways? Does he know that women are raped in cellars and have their throats slit while they scream?

Their relationship had become like the river - smooth and constant, but sluggish, opaque. They were standing on opposite banks, watching it go by. He dared not interrupt it - smash its calm, swim across - for fear of forcing some irrevocable change, for fear of losing even his current unloved place, or worse of struggling, flailing, of Edith not coming out to meet him, not even outstretching an arm.

...John wondered if she would ever be so unthinkingly imperious again; whether her childish powers of command would survive the dislocation from home, the knowledge of her smallness in the greater world.

John suppressed his desire to snap back and shock. It wasn't even that. His desire, almost physical, to speak of what he and Frank had done, we doing. He worried that his experiences would not be fully legible until then, even to himself. He wished to make them permanent, whole, to give them a place in the world. Every day, memories tugged fiercely for release. Words, details, salivated on his tongue.

We British are used to being ruthless, of course, but only the men. The women aren't. We don't grab. We shouldn't. But we have to, to make some room for ourselves.

Like this, ideas worked their way under his skin, until they became part of his whole response to the world, tingling under the surface of everything, flaring like fever when he encountered some prejudice, some small backwardness that made the world seem vast and intractable in its stupidity. Except, even then, he would be choked by shyness in the face of it; would go home and pace the sitting room.

No man should live his whole life in opposition to his nature.

Truths needn't always depend on facts for their expression.

it was truly the fault of all these other people behind and before him, going through life picking up prejudices like flowers from a verge, never giving them a thought though they stank of death.