Fellow Travelers Thomas Mallon Quotes

...causing him to consider the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness. Maybe there was only intensity-and then everything else.

he’d spent his whole life trying to make God love him—and that this didn’t matter in the slightest. All that mattered was that he loved God. He told me that once he knew this he was home free.

I always fall for the truly cold, cold people, cold men because I decide their reserve and awkwardness is really bottled-up warmth that they're waiting for me to release, an act for which they'll repay me with extravagant love.

I seem to be always searching for something to lose myself in completely... It’s like we say in seminary — ‘beyond measure.

With thanks to Hawkins Fuller (I got the job. You’re wonderful.) Timothy Laughlin

He wasn’t angry because she knew his secrets; he was angry because she couldn’t be the way out of them.

Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man on the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.

this name for a new Eden, whose recently glimpsed existence had now been fully confirmed.

he knew that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never be more in love than he was now.

Bless me, Father, for I have been unable to sin; he on´t see me.

But there are things I approve of less.” “Of our boy Skippy railing against the reds?” “No. Of your breaking his heart.

He turned his head far enough to plunge his face into the muscular flesh of Fuller’s chest and shoulder. In response, Fuller tousled and petted his hair, but the next words he said were inflamed, not soothing. “Who owns you?” Fuller whispered, sharply, into his ear.

as if the saint’s relics would provide an equally keen, but less risky, jolt than the saint.

America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. —ALLEN GINSBERG

Finland, that country so like himself, for so long half free and quite comfortable, somehow exempt from the fuss of near-apocalypse.

He could not deny what he still believed in his heart of hearts: that the censure of McCarthy would, despite everything, be a victory for the Communists

Nada de aquello le importaba. En ese momento sabía que diría cualquier mentira y negaría hasta tres veces a Cristo por un roce más de la mano de Hawkins.” Excerpt From Los lavanda: Fellow travelers

How could he explain? Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked Earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.

Her attraction to that solid type depended to some extent on a belief in herself as its opposite-a girl still cut out for unusual adventures and unusual personalities...Yes, it was time to put an end to her girlhood, but she couldn't yet put an end to this sense of herself...

It sounded like some early piece of the catechism, a cosmically important question-and-answer he had somehow missed, on the order of Who made us? God made us. But Tim’s confusion, and the desire to respond with the right answer, were lost in his own arousal. He whispered, “Hawkins Fuller,” not as an answer to the question, but simply an amazed statement of the other man’s actuality. “Hawkins Fuller,” he said, repeating this name for a discovery he felt the need to radio from one world to another, this name for a new Eden, whose recently glimpsed existence had now been fully confirmed.