White Girls Quotes

“For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“Regardless of where many of us believe we land - in that field encumbered by not too much baggage or entirely too much - we all come from the same place, which is a road rutted by experience so banal, nearly remarkable, that memory tricks us into remembrance of it again and again, as if experience alone were not enough. What are we to do with such a life, one in which we are not left alone to events - love, shopping, and so forth - but to the holocaust of feeling that memory, misremembered or not, imposes on us?”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“That's how you recognize love: you've never met it before.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“longing to trust someone; I was making life a fiction, or writing”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“Is this what love gets up to, one person demanding self-exposure so there’s more to love,”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“Part of our shared tragedy - we recognized it at once - was that we never separated from our mothers, which meant we liked girls more than the world like them, which is to say more than they liked each other, let alone themselves.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“But what galled our audience, really, is the fact that our friendship grew out of wanting to interest each other. We wanted the world to have no part in it.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“Writers' bodies don't make sense in a place like Hollywood: soft and white, defenseless in a town where everyone's defended, right up to their celluloid tits.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“I wanted to house myself in SL's thinking. It was so big and well lit, like a large house sitting solid on the bank of a river.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“I'd look on as old men walked down city streets arm in arm with their wives. I would watch babies resting on their mothers' bellies in patches of grass and sunlight in Central Park. I would watch cigarette-smoking teenagers glittering with meanness and youth, whispering and laughing as they shopped on lower Broadway. These exchanges of intimacy were all the same to me because they excluded me [...]”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“I need an audience to tell me how my love story is playing.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“He could respond intellectually only to those things he responded to emotionally.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“I cling to that story in The Symposium, of the two halves coming together in “an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight,” because that’s all I want to know.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“It's 2000, and I'm forty, and I have a real home at last. I've dropped my bags at SL's door. The house itself is composed of his skin and thought. Nearby, lilacs bloom in the garden door. Or are they hyacinths? "My mind forgets / The persons I have been along the way," Borges said. And yet it's those persons - in addition to my I - SL wants to hear about; he says they're a part of who I was. Oh, Lord, don't ever let this end: he smells like no one else on earth, and he sounds like no one else on earth. (SL's voice is so deep that people often ask him to speak up, but he is always speaking up.)”
― Hilton Als, White Girls

“I was an I, an opera of feeling with a very small audience, a writer of articles about culture but with no real voice, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a dream of love growing ever more expansive because it was impossible, especially in the gay bars I sometimes frequented in Manhattan, where AIDS loved everyone up the wrong way, or in a way some people weren’t surprised by, particularly by those gay men who were too indifferent to be sad — in any case night sweats were a part of the conversation people weren’t having in those bars, in any case, taking your closest friend in because he was shunned by his family was part of the conversation people weren’t having, still, there was this to contend with: that friend’s shirt collars getting bigger, still, there was this to contend with: his coughing and wheezing in the little room off your bedroom in Brooklyn because TB was catching, your friends didn’t want you to catch it, loving a man was catching, your friends didn’t want you to get it; his skin was thin as onionskin, there was a lesion, he couldn’t control his shit, not to mention the grief in his eyes, you didn’t want to catch that; those blue eyes filled with why? Causing one’s sphincter to contract, your heart to look away, a child’s question you couldn’t answer, what happened to our plans, why was the future happening so fast? You didn’t want to catch that, nor the bitterness of the sufferer’s family after death, nor the friends competing for a bigger slice of the death pie after the sufferer’s death, you certainly didn’t want to catch what it left: night sweats, but in your head, and all day, the running to a pay phone to share a joke, but that number’s disconnected, your body forgets, or rushes toward the love you remember, but it’s too late, he’s closer to the earth now than you are, and you certainly don’t want to catch any of that.”
― Hilton Als, White Girls