The Loves of My Life Quotes

“Now in the cold polar heart of old age I look at all my travails in love as comical and pointless, repetitious and dishonorable.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Michael Carroll, my husband, helps me in my precarious life and constant writing. He’s very good at “plot-walking,” which I think means divining what to write next. My ex-student and dear friend, Cody Cortes, has been a tireless reader and encouraging long-distance companion, thanks to Skype (we live thousands of miles apart).”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Am I the only one who believes hopeless love serves to upend a too well-ordered life so that it can flourish, that love is a way of moving a plant from a small box that it’s outgrown into a larger one to give it a new, more flourishing life, though transplanting, if it doesn’t work, might risk the organism’s very existence?”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“class and regional origins play a determining role in shaping character—”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“My next novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), was still experimental but much more openly gay. It is a letter addressed to a dead lover (who may be me or God!). It draws on the long tradition, going back to Rumi and St. John of the Cross, of confusing sex and piety, the deity with the beloved, an expression that reaches its acme in the baroque (think of Bernini’s sculpture the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, in which St. Michael stabs the writhing body of the lady saint).”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“In the pre-Stonewall era James Baldwin was the best uncloseted American novelist. Now it seems to me all the most talented new novelists are gay—the Nigerian Arinze Ifeakandu; the Brits Thomas Grattan and Tom Crewe; in France, Édouard Louis; in Finland, Pajtim Statovci; in America, Garth Greenwell and Bryan Washington. I’ve met most of them; there’s even an Edmund White award for the best new gay fiction.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“In the twentieth century gay content became widespread—especially in France: Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Jouhandeau, François Mauriac, and dozens of others. Eekhoud in Belgium, Kuzmin in Russia. Christopher Isherwood was the best and most open of the twentieth-century English gay writers, followed by Alan Hollinghurst.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“In the twentieth century gay content became widespread—especially in France: Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Jouhandeau, François Mauriac, and dozens of others.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Of course, Greek and Latin pastoral and funerary poetry is full of boy love, as are some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Marlowe’s plays and most of sixteenth-century Turkish love poetry (if you were actually in love with a girl, decorum demanded you address her as a boy). Japanese Buddhist priests loved their chigo or acolytes and there are lots of sixteenth-century tales about them.)”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Once the very seasoned composer Virgil Thomson said to me, when he was seventy-four and I thirty, that inventing things out of thin air was suitable for the short run but that imitation of life was the only way to make art over a long life (a curious observation for a composer).”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Kawabata’s novels Snow Country and The Sound of the Mountain, the seventeenth-century Essays in Idleness, in which we learn that frayed silk is more beautiful than new silk, that a house shouldn’t be too orderly. Now I’m reading Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives. Tanizaki wrote in his In Praise of Shadows that Japanese bathrooms with their wooden seats and pine boughs for plumbing were superior to Western surgically gleaming toilets, just as the “muddy” complexion of Japanese people was more appealing than the white faces of Europeans.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“In college, once in the height of my passion for a little straight wrestler, I threw myself into his arms weeping and declaring I knew my desire was sick, that I was in therapy to get well, but that a cure seemed still to be far off—and he got a hard-on and I went down on him, my face still wet with tears.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Foucault said that courtship was the most romantic moment for heterosexuals but that for gays it was the aftermath, the taxi ride alone uptown.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“No, I go for the real solid virtues: big dick, a top in bed, beautiful body, someone frequently stoned, jealous and possessive until the day he drops you and becomes jealous over someone new. A job is just a refractory period between orgasms; socializing is just a tease, a delay before serious fucking. Despite my frivolous tone, I recognize that Stonewall inaugurated an epoch when partners of the same sex could claim, maybe for the first time in history, their common humanity, their dignity, their rights. This victory permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring. We could build our marriages, love our families, invest ourselves into our work, express ourselves in uncoded novels and poems and in the thousand other endeavors created by human ingenuity. This freedom is something we will never relinquish.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“In my late twenties I had a Mormon sort of fantasy that I could choose a man as long as I was still attractive (under thirty-five?) and we’d be “sealed” for all eternity in an exclusive, unremitting love almost as if we were committed to a spaceship not destined to land for thousands of years.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“probably was dying. I keep reading François Villon, who may have lived in the fifteenth century but could have been speaking for us: Where are those gracious gallants now, whom I ran with in those long-gone times, such sweet singers, such good talkers, so pleasing to all in word and deed? Some are dead and stiff already; of these, there’s simply nothing left. May they find their peace in Paradise, and God save those of us still left!”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“But this guy seemed almost driven to be inside me, never so happy as when he was penetrating me; he urged himself on to go deeper and deeper, harder and harder. I was equally voracious, stimulated by his brutishness. We were in a fever clinic of reciprocal desire. For a while I would see him only at the baths. Once he saw me, he was sure to come in without hesitation; he could have no doubt as to our compatibility or our urgency.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“a time when the three greatest public evils were Communism, heroin addiction, and homosexuality.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“For me it was a religious experience to touch this god, kiss him, hold him in my feeble filiform arms, these useless pale appendages.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“The poet James Merrill had taught me to point at my victim then myself and then rub two fingers together (in Greece it would be “You, me, paréa [party]?”).”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“I had a very boyish lover at the time and one night, when we were heading home, the Kurdish supervisor of a building site gave me a red rose and my partner a pink rose. Later, standing among the girders of the new house, which smelled of sap, I gave the Kurd a blow job.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“bum. In Paris, back rooms were ideal since the French can’t speak to someone without an introduction but they can grope a complete stranger in a back room, where normal etiquette is suspended.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Whereas heterosexual men worry about impotence, and castration is their greatest fear, gays always have other sex organs—their holes, their mouths, their hands, their dildos, their whips. As in the play Bent, in which one prisoner in a death camp talks another to a climax, words are our secret weapons even where touch is forbidden. I like to think some of my books have cost some cum to a few readers.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Most suburban marriages of couples over forty, I’m told, are sexless, but how humiliating to have your husband or father identified as a homosexual, as a sex pig at that and not even one of those sensitive, tormented, and hopefully suicidal gays who only imagined their perversions, like those redeemable characters in “problem plays” who, if they didn’t off themselves, were saved for normality by the kindly mothers of their best friends.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Same-sex scandals were considered much worse than bankruptcy, alcoholism, domestic abuse, or heterosexual peccadilloes and were rivaled in awfulness only by being identified as a Communist or heroin addict.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Or maybe he was used to New Age exchanges with men who wanted wisdom and not just sex,”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“He held my hand a second too long and his middle finger stroked my palm.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“(I’d heard a gentleman, alas, is always judged by his shoes)”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“I know I’m contradicting myself. In the foreword I said I’d always felt some tenderness toward a sex partner, but in this case I felt contempt for Harold’s cowardice, his squeamishness, paired as it was with unrelenting daily lust.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

“Although Harold was the Catholic, he seemed much less guilt ridden than I and soon he was coming by every afternoon as I practiced the piano. He would stand behind me. He’d stand closer and closer until he’d be rubbing his erection against my shoulder blade, my undernourished wing. When I’d stop playing, though my hands were still on the keys, I’d look up at him and he’d be smiling in a sweet, fuzzy way and gently entreating, “Come on, let’s go upstairs to your room, please.”
― Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir