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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.

— Edmund White A Boy's Own Story (1982)

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Love

More quotes by Edmund White

All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

A Boy's Own Story (1982)

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.

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)

He's scattered, his sentences trail off, he sighs frequently, as though he's so intelligent he's always frustrated by the formulaic nature of speech (each sentence a ride you can't get off once the attendant buckles you into the car).

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)

I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.

In my middle-class teen-age world, the whole apparatus of going steady, exchanging ID bracelets, smooching at dances, fighting, breaking up, submitting to the arbitration of friends — that was the point, the public drama.

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Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell Marriage and Morals (1929)

Not for the body, but for the heart; companion and company are needed.

Sanu Sharma

Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies,
And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise.

Alexander Pope

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Edmund White (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.