Quotes from A Boy's Own Story — Edmund White
1940–2025 United States
← All quotes by Edmund White
5 quotes
All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
A Boy's Own Story (1982)
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.
A Boy's Own Story (1982)
Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man...
A Boy's Own Story (1982)
In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential — we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today — well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?
A Boy's Own Story (1982)
The school was nothing but reminiscence — of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.
A Boy's Own Story (1982)