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Andrew Holleran

Andrew Holleran Books

Novelist

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“You may be paralyzed from the neck down, you may have itchy skin and only one good eye, you may wake up every day still paralyzed, still in this nursing home, you may not be able to feed, bathe, or brush your teeth or wipe your butt or walk or dance or drive a car or take a shower or do one thing you want to do, including scratching your nose but you can't die, because everyone else has and you're all I've got.”

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Author:Andrew Holleran
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“One day he and Sutcliffe were walking down Madison Avenue when a man they knew came up and told them a mutual friend had just died in San Francisco. “Of it?” they gasped. “No,” the man said, “he was run over by a taxicab.” “Oh, thank God!” They both said in unison. That was where AIDS stood in the hierarchy of misfortune, somehow; in a class by itself—so grim its aura extended to the fact, he thinks as he enters the nursing home, that people who don’t have AIDS imagine somehow they’re not going to die.”

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Book:The Beauty of Men
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“Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people. They are designers, window dressers, models, photographers, graphic artists. They design the windows at Saks. Do you understand? They are a visual people, and they value the eye, and their sins, as Saint Augustine said, are the sins of the eye. And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts. It sounds absurd but it’s that simple. Everything is beautiful here, and that is all it is: beautiful. Do not expect anything else, do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye—and you will handle it all beautifully. You will know exactly what you are dealing with.”

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Book:Dancer from the Dance
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“But Malone was thinking now and as he watched the men lighting cigarettes for each other in the dark, having sex beneath the trees, he turned to his friend and said in a wondering voice: “Isn’t it strange that when we fall in love, this great dream we have, this extraordinary disease, the only thing in which either 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?”

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Book:Dancer from the Dance
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“We lived only to dance. What was the true characteristic of a queen, I wondered later on; and you could argue that forever. “What do we all have in common in this group?” I once asked a friend seriously, when it occurred to me how slender, how immaterial, how ephemeral the bond was that joined us; and he responded, “We all have lips.” Perhaps that is what we all had in common: no one was allowed to be serious, except about the importance of music, the glory of faces seen in the crowd. We had our songs, we had our faces! We had our web belts and painter’s jeans, our dyed tank tops and haircuts, the plaid shirts, bomber jackets, jungle fatigues, the all-important shoes.”

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Book:Dancer from the Dance
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“For that is the curious quality of the discotheque after you have gone there a long time: in the midst of all the lights, and music, the bodies, the dancing, the drugs, you are stiller than still within, and though you go through the motions of dancing you are thinking a thousand disparate things. You find yourself listening to the lyrics, and you wonder what these people around you are doing. They seemed crazed to you. You stand there on a floor moving your hips, wondering if there is such a thing as love, and conscious for the very first time that it is three-twenty-five and the night only half-over. You put the popper to your nostril, you put a hand out to lightly touch the sweaty, rigid stomach of the man dancing next to you, your own chest is streaming with sweat in that hot room, and you are thinking, as grave as a judge: What will I do with my life? What can any man do with his life? And you finally don’t know where to rest your eyes. You don’t know where to look, as you dance. You have been expelled from the communion of the saints.”

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Book:Dancer from the Dance
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“They seldom looked happy. They passed one another without a word in the elevator, like silent shades in hell, hell-bent on their next look from a handsome stranger. Their next rush from a popper. The next song that turned their bones to jelly and left them all on the dance floor with heads back, eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata.”

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Book:The Dancer from the Dance: A Novel
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