“In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential — we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today — well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?”

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Four (p. 92).

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Edmund White 28
American novelist and LGBT essayist 1940

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