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9ed917c
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He wanted pure compliments, just as he wanted unconditional love.
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happy
love
insecure
line-of-beauty
insecurity
sad
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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9bb36f4
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The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.
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people
behavior
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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784da8d
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all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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a7f4794
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The pursuit of love seemed to need the cultivation of indifference.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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2493813
|
To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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30aebc2
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she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.
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reading
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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8896144
|
Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcin..
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hard-on
maleness
reflexes
shower-room
penis
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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8de5754
|
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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447fd43
|
Nick felt a tear rise to his eye at the thought of the child's utter innocence of hangovers.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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fc63b33
|
Delight is delice, delit is a misdemeanour' 'Well, it's bloody close...' 'Well, they often are....
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forbidden-fruit
french
sin
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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77681e4
|
All families are silly in their own way.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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054117d
|
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 middl..
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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6e96c5e
|
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.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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525ebf0
|
She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she'd read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art--she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge..
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books
what-s-the-name-of-that-book
remembering
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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feb4f77
|
Ricky clearly never hurried, he was his own lazy happening.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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bcfb737
|
On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going - not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down.
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children
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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b6dc4b1
|
He somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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fb121df
|
She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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3cc48ac
|
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
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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7f5fcb7
|
Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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96de3fe
|
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. Wh..
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trollope
|
Alan Hollinghurst |
|
8675281
|
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."
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|
men
|
Alan Hollinghurst |
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b9739ea
|
like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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f057bb9
|
He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories.
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memories
|
Alan Hollinghurst |
|
56a0d0f
|
And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
|
6be3867
|
'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.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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279ceb2
|
There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism
|
|
politics
conservatism
|
Alan Hollinghurst |
|
3c62a40
|
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.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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d027ec8
|
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.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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f066669
|
He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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4474101
|
There are chaps who don't care for them, you know. Simply can't abide them. Can't stand the sight of them, their titties and their big sit-upons,
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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99c0e9a
|
I thought, these are the evening routines which will soon be mine, the tug of an unknown suburb, or a bar, or a lover.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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b3d5090
|
When Senta started singing it was spellbinding--Daphne said this word to herself with a further shiver of pleasure.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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fb136da
|
I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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9ff4cd4
|
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 gener..
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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72c0482
|
The seat I had taken was marked for the use of the elderly and handicapped, but had another claimant come, a figure like Charles, for instance, I would have been prepared to leave the train, when my stop came, with a lurching gait or limb held awry to designate my previously unguessed incapacity.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
|
eb40e72
|
It's always his big day these days. He hardly has a small one.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
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f30f8c7
|
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 grat..
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Alan Hollinghurst |
|
64c28d3
|
The birdsong was so loud that after it had woken you it drove you back to sleep.
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Alan Hollinghurst |
|
0a501fb
|
Peter was that magic person we all meet, if we're lucky, who shows us how to live our lives, and be ourselves.
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|
Alan Hollinghurst |
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56c0dba
|
It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong.
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|
Alan Hollinghurst |
|
457c779
|
older vowels were showing through as he said that it was "awfully good of" his parents to have tolerated him."
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Alan Hollinghurst |
|
6126812
|
Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman's smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.
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|
Alan Hollinghurst |
|
e529f2d
|
The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing
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Alan Hollinghurst |