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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 States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)

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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)

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)

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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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.