The Beautiful Room Is Empty Quotes

“Suffering does make us more sensitive until it crushes us completely.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word ad immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the the beautiful room is empty." Franz Kafka (in a letter to Milena Jesenska)”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved—the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“...I believe no one else can correct our feelings; they are pure, incorrigible.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“The sun found over there a single small window to dazzle - - just as I imagined God, if He existed, might find in a whole crowd only one soul turned at the right angle to reflect his glory.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“And William laughed with his special blend of mischief, compounded of humor, spite, and sadness in a ratio even he wasn't sure of but that he mixed by feel.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“Because a novel--these words--is a shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at all requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added. But for an instant imagine the process reversed, go with me back through the years, then be me, all alone as I submit to the weight, the atmospheric pressure of youth, for when I was young I was exhausted by always bumping up against this big lummox I didn't really know, myself. It was though I'd been forced into solitary confinement with a stranger who had unaccountable tastes, aversions, rhythms.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty

“I’d been waiting and waiting year after year to grow up so I could lead the gay life, and all the while I’d been wasting my most precious capital, my youth.”
― Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty