Quotes by Edmund White

Edmund White

All his leisure clothes were absurd – jokes, really – as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

Absurd

Clothes

Leisure

Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger – it might leave us stuck with last year’s cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.

Ideas

Views

Years

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

Avenging

Class

People

Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.

Looks

Men

Reflection

Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds – oh if that were the devil I would fear him.

Devil

Energy

Men

For most Northerners, Texas is the home of real men. The cowboys, the rednecks, the outspoken self-made right-wing millionaires strike us as either the best or worst examples of American manliness…. The ideal is not an illusion nor is it contemptible, no matter what damage it may have done. Many people who scorn it in conversation want to submit to it in bed. Those who believe machismo reeks of violence alone choose to forget it once stood for honor as well.

Believe

Home

Real

Hell is God’s Absence.

Absence

Hell

How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.

Book

Past

Sick

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.

Ethical Questions

Loneliness

Sex

I felt if I went chronologically, I’d get bogged down in childhood and that’s part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.

America

Childhood

Culture

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Absence

Absurd

Adventure

Albums

America

Ashes

Atheist

Avant Garde

Avenging

Beautiful

Believe

Book

Boys

Childhood

Class

Classic

Clothes

Consolation

Crazy

Culture

Cynical

Dark

Desire

Details

Devil

Draws

Dream

Energy

Ethical Questions

Facts

Flames

Forgotten

Gay

Hate

Hell

Home

Ideas

Imagination

Intensity

Irrelevance

Italian

Leisure

Loneliness

Looks

Luxury

Memories

Men

Night

Order

Pace

The Future Blueprint

Tool

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

Tool

The Autobiography

Tool

The Behaviour Diary

Tool

The Dating Diary

Tool

The Relationship Therapist

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Quotes by Edmund White

Edmund White

All his leisure clothes were absurd – jokes, really – as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.

Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger – it might leave us stuck with last year’s cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.

Energy in itself is a sort of redemption. No wonder we admire Satan. But if the Devil were listless, if he were a pale man in his underwear who watched television by day behind closed venetian blinds – oh if that were the devil I would fear him.

Hell is God’s Absence.

I felt if I went chronologically, I’d get bogged down in childhood and that’s part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

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