Edmund White Quotes

Older guys have too much emotional baggage. They’ve already lived their lives.

I asked him what it was like to live in a monastery and meditate for a year. He said it was a waste of time, that he never meditated, and that the older monks were interested only in feeling up boys, playing cards, and telling fortunes, that they were a dirty, lazy, superstitious lot.

Modern readers are responsive to Proust’s tireless and brilliant analyses of love because we, too, no longer take love for granted. Readers today are always making the personal public, the intimate political, the instinctual philosophical. Proust may have attacked love, but he did know a lot about it. Like us, he took nothing for granted. He was not on smug, cozy terms with his own experience. We read Proust because he knows so much about the links between childhood anguish and adult passion. We read Proust because, despite his intelligence, he holds reasoned evaluations in contempt and knows that only the gnarled knowledge that suffering brings us is of any real use. We read Proust because he knows that in the terminal stage of passion we no longer love the beloved; the object of our love has been overshadowed by love itself: “And this malady which Swann’s love had become had so proliferated, was so closely interwoven with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he hoped for after his death, was so utterly inseparable from him, that it would have been impossible to eradicate it without almost entirely destroying him; as surgeons say, his love was no longer operable.

Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.

Just think of dick as pussy on a stick.

America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.

At my age (seventy-eight), I realize that everyone, or almost everyone except Hitler, will be forgotten from this period; if a writer can shore up an eroding coastline for a decade or two, that’s the only “immortality” we’ll ever know on this dying planet.

He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.

Later I would know some real workers — heavily tattooed, hair worn in ponytails, motorcycle-riding, manga-reading, and pill-popping — and I realized they were as batty as we were, far from the standardized robots of our fantasies. Americans, rich or poor, were a nation of weirdos.

Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing — shirt, tie, jacket — felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles.

I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots.

Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely.

The sun found over there a single small window to dazzle - - just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect his glory.

You’re universally liked because you’re such a black hole in space. You don’t have any real traits. You’re sympa, at least as much as a narcissist can be, but that means nothing. You’re beautiful and everybody projects onto you what they’re looking for, which is easy to do since you don’t stand for anything definite. You’re a black hole in space.

Characters — conventional women with minor eccentricities — flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she'd failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas.