A Single Man: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

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

A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority—not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities, because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest.

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.…”

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.”

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

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.

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

(There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don’t we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought

the overpowering sloth of sadness

But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can’t you see what nonsense that is? What’s to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?