Tom Cardamone > Quotes

“Lost love weighs heavier than lost time.”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered

“He craved sex and chocolate. Chocolate was his heroin. Men were his needle.”
― Tom Cardamone, Night Sweats

“You marry the one who will be a good father, not a good lay.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pumpkin Teeth

“Imagine how much more frightening death must be to an immortal?”
― Tom Cardamone, Pumpkin Teeth

“I’ve always assumed the old men were just there, fixed, like lamps, but in love with their moths.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pacific Rimming

“The Stonewall riot may have been the start of a civil rights movement, but it was not the beginning of our history.”
― Tom Cardamone

“Never bet the devil your head.”
― Tom Cardamone, Night Sweats

“Most species of dragons had retired or, mistaken for dinosaurs, collectively hung their bones in museums, waiting in the wings for just the right time to reemerge, to scorch schools and char church parking lots.”
― Tom Cardamone, Wilde Stories 2012: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction

“a few glorious creatures are something between a man and a woman and I befriend them, finding their difference a blessing, a relief, proof that we are a flourishing garden and not opposing sides of a duly carved chess board,”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lurid Sea

“Next door I could hear the old man’s soul flap its heavy vermillion butterfly wings as the hustler shot a load down his throat.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pumpkin Teeth

“Books about books are a rare species, special tomes for writers and book lovers. More than an affirmation of taste, a book about books is often a spirited celebration and sincere investigation. Quickly coveted, it remains on that particular shelf, guarded and revered, and eventually slips out of print. What good company we will keep then, among a library lost, only momentarily invisible, waiting patiently to be found.”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered

“I could hear an old man in the stall next to ours sucking a hustler’s cock; I thought of animals gathering at a salt lick during the night near a cave: carnivore rubbing shoulders with deer.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pumpkin Teeth

“When you want something as powerful and necessary as love, you don’t reach back, you reach forward.”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered

“When people complain about the energy and ingenuity gays devote to silly pursuits, they should be reminded that so many serious ones are closed to us.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Many people (and not just gay men) recognized their lives when they first read A Boy’s Own Story. That was a big part of its importance.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“There is very little literature even on the fringes of our American canon describing sex in old age, and even less willing to explore the complexities of what motivates us sexually beyond the simple goal of orgasm-related satisfaction.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Sure that there was an attainable bliss somewhere beyond the decimal point in the p of his sexual trysts, I felt that maybe he had already attained what I was looking for, a more instinctual regard for sex, an equality among thirsts. He had done what I wanted to do: washed the wound of appetite in a relentless waterfall of sweat and semen.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pacific Rimming

“Obsidio. His name is ash on my tongue. A gray ash smoothed and molded into a paste by the very saliva he summons—a new unguent I apply to every cock I fellate that is not his. No matter the man, he is always in my mouth.”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lurid Sea

“I was a lover of books before I was a lover of men.”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lurid Sea

“We shiver with pleasure at stories of Pollack pissing into bourgeois fireplaces. What was rare about Edmund’s case, thrilling to me, appalling to Merrill, was that he felt compelled to piss into the intellectual fireplace. Even more important, he did so without ever rejecting conventional intellectual and artistic standards. So, not a revolution, but a coup. And, as if his art were as harmless as a dove’s, it all sounded like cooing.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Cocks aside, if not books and scrolls, then music makes me feel complete.”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lurid Sea

“White was being modest. He didn’t merely identify himself as gay by putting his real name on The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977. He outed himself as a sexually active gay man.

“To all my tricks, from Ed.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“No matter how virally sullied we might become, we were not dirt.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Gore Vidal once said to me during an interview. “I think he’s out of his mind. Why limit yourself any more than literature has limited you? In a world where people don’t read, what are you going to make of a man who calls himself a gay novelist? What’s that supposed to mean, that he’s only going to write about cock?”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“I wish I were writing this on you.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pacific Rimming

“If beauty was in the eye of the beholder, he was going to be one hell of a beholder.”
― Tom Cardamone, Night Sweats

“Edmund White crashes through the cathedrals of art, history, politics, culture, and memory.”
― Tom Cardamone, Crashing Cathedrals: Edmund White by the Book

“Be calm. Keep reading.”
― Tom Cardamone, Night Sweats

“Colonel Sanders as played by Hot Daddy Harrison Ford, cracking the whip on some island plantation, topping every native boy, stopping only long enough to enjoy a refreshing Coca Cola. Because every white guy is a blonde, Aryan top. All of us are the Christian Soldiers of Capitalism that flew TWA into your country, depositing AIDs in your brothels and IMF loans in your banks.”
― Tom Cardamone, Pacific Rimming

“I realized this was happening all over the empire. Everywhere men congregated, men fucked, men sucked, men grunted, men sighed. If I ever happened to fancy a certain race, I needed only travel to that corner of the world to satisfy my tastes. What books had been written about my particular practice? Were entire libraries dedicated to vice? A sense of adventure brimmed within. I would branch out, explore, spread my budding wings and make the world mine.”
― Tom Cardamone, The Lurid Sea