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I can be bawdy but I detest vulgarity – anything that suggests sex is not a mystery but rather a cozy, funny pastime. My true friends share my feeling of being a tourist on earth, a visitor dropping in on life, whereas vulgar people use dirty jokes to suggest they’re on intimate, even dismissive terms with the great mysteries. That must be a goal: to be worldly without being blasé, to be innocent without being naïve – to know everything and to take nothing for granted, to know the value of everything and the price of nothing.
-- Edmund White, My Lives
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