David Leavitt Quotes

• “Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.”

  David Leavitt

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• “When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.”

  David Leavitt

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• “I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.”

  David Leavitt

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• “We all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what's left to recall but past anticipation? What's left to anticipate but future retrospection?”

  David Leavitt

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• “Foi a bordo do Elevador da Bica que Edward me disse pela primeira vez que Iris era católica.
  - Desconfio que a sua infância foi passada do seguinte modo - disse ele. - Com as freiras a darem-lhe pequenas penitências para cumprir. Mas, mal cumpria a primeira volta, já tinha cometido novo pecado. E assim para todo o sempre.
  - Ela ainda é praticante?
  - Já não. Desistiu quando casou comigo. Dos dogmas da fé, ainda que não dos terrores. Os terrores, esses são mais difíceis de nos vermos livres deles.”

  David Leavitt

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• “Hope had stolen into his life just as he was growing comfortable with despair.”

  David Leavitt

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• “Sex, my darling, is often the least important part of a passion. You'll learn that when you get older. - Maria Luisa (Tushi) Strauss”

  David Leavitt

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• “Cautiously his foot explored, wiggled as it could, and finally felt warm flesh under the pants leg.”

  David Leavitt

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• “Spouse or collaborator, it comes to the same thing. And there is work to be done. Always, always work to be done." -David Leavitt, "Partition," _The Indian Clerk_”

  David Leavitt

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• “To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men.
  
  Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond.
  
  Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.”

  David Leavitt

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• “I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext.”

  David Leavitt

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• “Así que huyes de los causantes de dolor, vas a un sitio nuevo, intentas convencerte de que el viejo sitio no existe, que la distancia borra la historia”

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• “Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you.”

  David Leavitt

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• “La relación entre Edward y yo fue una historia típica que, atrapada en la guerra, se volvió trágica...pero eso también es una historia típica”

  David Leavitt

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• “L’invisibilità è la qualità fondamentale di un voltapagine: in scena, egli deve cercare di cancellare il più possibile la sua presenza, dando l’impressione che le pagine si voltino da sole. Il voltapagine ha il raro privilegio di sentire un pianista quasi come sente se stesso: sentire il suo canto sommesso, i gemiti che di quando in quando gli sfuggono tra i denti, lo schiocco sordo delle unghie contro i tasti. E non solo sentirlo, ma vederlo; studiarlo.”

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• “Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.”

  David Leavitt

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• “«La mezza età dei froci non è cosa a cui guardare senza orrore» disse dopo un momento. «Cosa?» «Virginia Woolf, nei diari. Non preoccuparti, non l’ho scritto io.»
  Prese un fazzolettino di carta dalla borsa. «Però, devo dire che sono d’accordo. Insomma, non ti sembra tutto piuttosto tragico? Arrivano a cinquant’anni e all’improvviso cominciano a collezionare saliere, o ad allevare cani. Qualsiasi cosa pur di tamponare la loro solitudine.»  «È questo il problema di Joseph? La solitudine?»  «Ho sempre pensato che la mancanza di figli sia la vendetta della biologia sugli omosessuali.»  «Ma Joseph non è solo. Ha il suo amico.»  «Che lo fa soffrire più di chiunque altro.» ”

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• “Non c’è dispiacere più grande che ricordare la gioia passata nell’infelicità. ”

  David Leavitt

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• “«Gli argini della memoria» aveva detto Joseph. Che espressione misteriosa, come se la memoria fosse un fiume. Ed era così che Tushi vedeva Joseph adesso: in riva a un fiume, con i pantaloni arrotolati sopra le caviglie e le lunghe gambe che sguazzavano nell’acqua mentre si chinava a setacciare il limo, la sabbia e il fango che erano la sua storia. Cosa avrebbe dragato prima dell’alba? Qualcosa che l’avrebbe aiutato? Tushi lo sperava, ma non ne era sicura. ”

  David Leavitt

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• “Christmas was over. It had passed, as usual, in a fever of generosities, and left an aftertaste of swindle in its wake. "Anticippointment" Pamela said . . . and there was in that invented word all the regret and resignation that forty-seven years of Christmases had built up in her.”

  David Leavitt

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• “Quizá esté en la naturaleza de la amistad, en cuanto opuesta al amor, que la consideremos una continuidad que no hay que alimentar y de la que nos alejemos cuanto nos apetece, convencidos de que, al igual que el afecto de nuestra madre, estará allí para recibirnos en el momento en que regresemos. Pero, ay, no es lo que ocurre con la amistad, que a la postre se asemeja más al amor de lo que la mayoría de la gente admite.”

  David Leavitt

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• “¡Oh, el anhelo payasesco de quienes no han sido amados tal cual son!”

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• “Assume makes an ass out of you and me - p.239”

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• “Assume makes an ass out of you and me.”

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• “Sometimes I think you are doomed to happiness”

  David Leavitt

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