Quote

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.

Edmund White

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Edmund White
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 13
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Memoirist
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Cincinnati
Ohio
Edmund Valentine White III
Wells
Breaks
Well
Communication
Understood
Perhaps
Break
Understanding
Desire
Awaken
Another
Attracted

More quotes by Edmund White

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At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.
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The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.
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As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together
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The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books.
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The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.
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Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.
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All his leisure clothes were absurd - jokes, really - as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
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These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.
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Hell is God's Absence.
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Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.
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I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
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Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger - it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.
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I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...
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Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.
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Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.
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I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.
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I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique.
Edmund White
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In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.
Edmund White
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Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds - oh if that were the devil I would fear him.
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I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
Edmund White