A Boy's Own Story Quotes

“For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve--then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“Despite my fears and my aching loneliness, I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life, a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I think he had no notion how little an effect the word sin had on me. He might as well have said, "Homosexuality is bad juju”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“Kevin was restless; he belly-flopped into the water, spraying me, stood, turned and scudded more water at me with the heel of his hand. I knew I should shout ''Geronimo!'' and leap in after him, clamber up on his back and push him under. The horseplay would dissolve the tension and sexual melancholy; my body would become not a snare but a friendly sort of weapon.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“What I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn’t worthy.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I was aware of the treacherous air vents above us, conducting the sounds we were making upstairs. Maybe dad was listening. Or maybe, just like Kevin, he was unaware of anything but the pleasure spurting up out of his body and into mine.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I thought I knew how my father must feel all the time; lonely and responsible. No one looked at him for amusement. He was dull, He wasn’t fashionable. He was deliberate, but he didn’t shirk his responsibilities. He could always be counted upon to do the right thing.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“Kevin's parents had bumped me from my upstairs room, The place where last weak i had read Death In Venice and luxuriated in the tale of a dignified grown-up who died for the love of an indifferent boy my age. That was the sort of power i wanted over a man. And i awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks-more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taught strings.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“That man's embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“It was men, not women, who struck me as foreign and desirable and I disguised myself as a child or a man or whatever was necessary in order to enter their hushed, hieratic company, my disguise so perfect I never stopped to question my identity. Nor did I want to study the face beneath my mask, lest it turn out to have the pursed lips, dead pallor and shaped eyebrows by which one can always recognize the Homosexual.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“Once I accepted my extravagant mendicancy I stumbled upon the sober, intelligent little boy I had once been. This was the kid with the sweet smile and an interest in all sorts of things, the boy with brushed hair and cloudless eyes, the child so whole he could forget himself: the birthday boy.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“All my life I’ve made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I was three people: the boy who smelled bad when I was with my sister; the boy who was wise and kind beyond his years when I was with my mother; but when I was alone not a boy at all but a principle of power, of absolute power.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I saw that the anger and hauteur of the past, which I’d accepted without interpreting, had been merely a counterpart to his isolation and the terrible shame he’d felt about the way he looked. If he couldn’t participate in the festivities of friendship and romance, then he’d burn the tents and poison the wells.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“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.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“The thought of resuming my life made me want to end it—unless I could change it completely.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“When I grew up I would always be frank, loving and generous.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing?”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story