Top 40 Andrew Holleran Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Indifference is the greatest aphrodisiac.”

— Andrew Holleran

2. “Now of all the bonds between homosexual friends, none was greater than that between friends who danced together. The friend you danced with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life; and for people who went without lovers for years, that was all they had.”

— Andrew Holleran

3. “Witty people came out in autumn; beauties in July.”

— Andrew Holleran

4. “When you put something down that happened, people often don’t believe it; whereas, you can make up anything, and people assume it must have happened to you.”

— Andrew Holleran

5. “There are three lies in life,” Sutherland said to his young companion, whose first night this was in the realm of homosexuality and whose introduction to it Sutherland had taken upon himself to supervise. “One, the check is in the mail. Two, I will not come in your mouth. And three, all Puerto Ricans have big cocks,” he said.”

— Andrew Holleran

6. “A moral man is essentially dumbfounded when confronted by a man who is amoral – everything the latter does is met with a certain disbelief.”

— Andrew Holleran

7. “Living for beauty is all very fine, but it’s a hard regimen and burns up the heart very quickly.”

— Andrew Holleran

8. “Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with the moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after which you have ached, dreamed, longed for, the face shatters, every time.”

— Andrew Holleran

9. “Some live for love more than others. And he experienced a death that night.”

— Andrew Holleran

10. “During those snowy New England winters, besides learning to rise at five to study calculus and trudge two miles through the drifts for breakfast down the road, he had suppressed some tremendous element in himself that took form in a prudish virginity. While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass: moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.”

— Andrew Holleran

11. “Homosexuality is like a boarding school in which there are no vacations.”

— Andrew Holleran

12. “They were bound together by a common love of a certain kind of music, physical beauty, and style – all the things one shouldn’t throw away an ounce of energy pursuing, and sometimes throw away a life pursuing.”

— Andrew Holleran

13. “The point is that we are not doomed because we are homosexual, my dear, we are doomed only if we live in despair because of it, as we did on the beaches and the streets of Suck City.”

— Andrew Holleran

14. “The more beautiful the sky, the more hopeless the neighborhood.”

— Andrew Holleran

15. “If your friends don’t want your boyfriend, what’s the point?”

— Andrew Holleran

16. “You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order.”

— Andrew Holleran

17. “Tomorrow the rush of men, all working for a living, would drown him; but now, at this moment, in this soft green twilight, this soft green Sunday evening, when the heart of the world seemed to lie beating in the palm of his hand, he sat in that huge house upstairs terrified that he would never live.”

— Andrew Holleran

18. “You are doomed to a life that will repeat itself again and again, as do all lives – for lives are static things, readings of already written papers – but whereas some men are fortunate to repeat a good pattern, others have the opposite luck – and you can surely see by now that your life is doomed to this same humiliation, endlessly repeated.”

— Andrew Holleran

19. “He did not wish to be the man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”

— Andrew Holleran

20. “They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.”

— Andrew Holleran

21. “Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn’t last beyond the morning, then know I love you.”

— Andrew Holleran

22. “And the story of a boy’s love for a boy will never capture the world’s heart as the story of a boy’s love for a girl.”

— Andrew Holleran

23. “I am in fact so depressed that last night while Bob Cjaneovic was sitting on my face, I began to think how futile life is, no matter what you do – it all ends in Death, we are given such a short time, and everything truly is, as Ecclesiastes says, Vanity, Vanity, Vanity.”

— Andrew Holleran

24. “While his life was impeccable on the surface, he felt he was behind glass; moving through the world in a separate compartment, touching no one else.”

— Andrew Holleran

25. “They were the most romantic creatures in the city in that room. If their days were spent in banks and office buildings, no matter: Their true lives began when they walked through this door – and were baptized into a deeper faith, as if brought to life by miraculous immersion. They lived only for the night.”

— Andrew Holleran

26. “He fell in love with people he did not know how to meet.”

— Andrew Holleran

27. “Love is, after all, my darlings, all anticipation and imagination, and when they finally met they would say something perfectly mundane!”

— Andrew Holleran

28. “He felt as if he were a character in Henry James; he began to suspect he was to be that man to whom nothing whatsoever was to happen.”

— Andrew Holleran

29. “I just feel it’s ruined my life. It drains me, you know, it’s like having a tumor, or a parasite! If I were straight I’d get married and that would be it. But being gay, I waste so much time imagining! I hate the lying to my family, and I know I’ll never be any of the things they expect of me,” he said, “because it’s like having cancer but you can’t tell them, that’s what a secret vice is like.”

— Andrew Holleran

30. “He saw in that instant a life he could not conceive of opening before him, a hopeless abyss. Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost.”

— Andrew Holleran

31. “That must be love! Or is it what Dr. Rose Franzblau says in the Post? The mutual support of two mature people involved in separate quests for self-realization.”

— Andrew Holleran

32. “They made love much later on a mattress in the living room, as the cries of children playing in the street echoed around them, and when Malone left he had fallen in love; not with the young man, but the thought of him in the bathtub with his candles reading books of anatomy; and when Malone went to see him the next time, he simply sat with him in the bathroom and did not even ask to make love.”

— Andrew Holleran

33. “When you find the right girl, you must take her to Sandrudabad in April and see the flamboyant trees in bloom. There is nothing so wonderful as seeing the wonders of this earth with someone you love!”

— Andrew Holleran

34. “There is no reason per se to live. People do things from the heart, not from reason. Ther is no reason to live.”

— Andrew Holleran

35. “For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich – the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising – and one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana’s: “Money is the petrol of life.”

— Andrew Holleran

36. “Malone had been raised by a lady both Irish and Catholic, in a good bourgeois home in which careless table manners were a sin, much less this storm in his heart.”

— Andrew Holleran

37. “Isn’t it strange that when we fall in love, this great dream we have, this extraordinary disease, the only thing in which eather one of us is interested, it’s inevitably with some perfectly ordinary drip who for some reason we cannot define is the magic bearer, the magician, the one who brings all this to us. Why?”

— Andrew Holleran

38. “He stopped visiting married friends. Married friends, he decided one evening after returning from a visit, depress me.”

— Andrew Holleran

39. “He was a prisoner of love.”

— Andrew Holleran

40. “Have you ever noticed,” he said, stirred now by this vision of domestic bliss that was beyond his reach, and shocked earlier that evening to find himself crying in the subway on his way home from a client, “that gay people secrete everything in each other’s presence but tears?”

— Andrew Holleran

41. “What, we may well ask, is there left to live for? Why get out of bed? For this dreary round of amusing insincerity? This filthy bourgeois society that the Aristotelians have foisted upon us? No, we may still choose to live like gods, like poets. Which brings us down to dancing. Yes,” he said, turning to Malone, “that is all that’s left when love has gone.”

— Andrew Holleran

42. “He usually smoked a cigarette and sat down and introduced himself to someone and chatted – in the sweetest, calmest, most amiable way, poised, adult, and wise.”

— Andrew Holleran

43. “He was more than ever certain that he had a vague romantic destiny. Little wonder that when he looked at strangers on the street now, his unquiet yearning for rescue went out to them.”

— Andrew Holleran

44. “But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at that sparkling snowfall. That was it. That was Malone – standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.”

— Andrew Holleran

45. “You know, when people who were once religious no longer believe in God, they never really change; they just go on, hunting for the ecstatic food, trying to satisfy that hunger.”

— Andrew Holleran

46. “You fell in love with him right away: with his fine blue eyes, his moustache, his red hooded sweat shirt and tennis sneakers, his slender form, his chesthut hair, the way he looked at you with that blend of humor, intelligence, and relaxed confidence.”

— Andrew Holleran

47. “He went to Yale Club and wrote a long letter to his parents explaining his unhappiness with the law, and the next day he resigned from Courdet Brothers in order to “pursue a career in journalism.” What he wished to pursue was a career in love.”

— Andrew Holleran

48. “He wandered the streets and parks with the deep pleasure of someone who is saying good-bye to a place, which, once it has been relegated to the past, now seems especially touching.”

— Andrew Holleran