A Single Man: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

Grant has no private income, a wife and three imprudently begotten children.

The past is over. People make believe that it isn’t, and they show you things in museums. But that’s not the past. You won’t find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter.”

You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity,

(He is continually starting these self-improvement projects: sometimes it’s memory training, sometimes a new diet, sometimes just a vow to read some unreadable Hundredth Best Book. He seldom perseveres in any of them for long.)

Jim, lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other’s presence.

Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary.

the overpowering sloth of sadness

the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool?

While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.…”