The Beautiful Room Is Empty (The Edmund Trilogy, #2) QUOTES

1 " 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 Edmund Trilogy, #2)

3 " ...I believe no one else can correct our feelings; they are pure, incorrigible. "

― Edmund White , The Beautiful Room Is Empty (The Edmund Trilogy, #2)

5 " Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis. "

― Edmund White , The Beautiful Room Is Empty (The Edmund Trilogy, #2)

7 " 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 (The Edmund Trilogy, #2)

9 " 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 (The Edmund Trilogy, #2)