c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
...The fact that it's black transforms it. Has the same effect on women that black stockings have on men.
— Daphne du Maurier
Maybe perversion was not illness at all. Maybe every form of deviance was just a potential force of union and community, one that had not yet organized itself into political lobbies, self-help groups, bowling leagues...Once you grant legitimacy to one sexual proclivity, what's to stop the others from demanding their rights too?
— Supervert, Necrophilia Variations
It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love.
— Mary Renault, The Charioteer
The idea of giving a man a rim job provoked the squeamishness I felt at thirteen when I accidentally stumbled upon my first porn, Women Who Love Big White Cocks. I was repulsed that a woman would put her mouth on a man’s penis. After all, that’s where he pees. I got older. I discovered my sexuality and on countless occasions, put my mouth where a boy peed. He put his mouth where I peed, put his fingers where I pooped, put where he peed where I pooped, and we swapped saliva the entire time. Men forgot that the female breasts that ignited their hard-ons fed them as infants. We didn’t realize that although the meaning changed, our “dirty places” remained the same.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
We didn’t realize that although the meaning changed, our “dirty places” remained the same.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
Dehumanization always follows penetration.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
i am the lion and you are the lamb and as prophesied, we will lie down together.
— Thomas Lloyd Qualls, Love Jaywalks: Poems From The Novel Waking Up At Rembrandts
The separation of sexuality from procreation in Greek culture helps explain the terrible demographic decay that Greece would suffer during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.
— Daniel P. Goldman
Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it — a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
I refuse to believe that all men are pigs and women competing whores.
— Anastasia, Master of the Universe: Memoirs - Book One
Don't let lack of sexual communication get in the way of your pleasure any longer. Dare to ask the questions that will make sex so much more enjoyable, boost passion, and facilitate a deeper connection and intimacy in your relationship.
— Miya Yamanouchi
Lea found that she was saying things, saying them pretty loudly, but had no clear concept of what she was saying. [Sean and Andy’s] names, maybe. The seventy-two names of God. The capitals of all fifty states.Love. That word featured in there a lot. Which made sense. To the extent that Lea had any sense left a
— K.D. West, The Visitor Entertains
Girls have periods and boys wank. Everybody.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
repeat after me:1. our immigrant families are not just ‘homophobic’ they are also ‘colonized.’2. our parents have histories, genders, and sexualities, too.3. they are just as broken as we are (but we have the words — i mean the english — to say it)4. the diaspora responds to racism with heteronormativity5. trauma seeps through generations
— Darkmatter
One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Aromatherapy in lovemaking inspires us to slow down and enjoy the process of creation with our beloved. It takes time to smell, create, drop, and blend together. Slowness and anticipation of what’s to come is part of the fun. Savor the moment or, with luck, hours.
— Elana Millman, Aromatherapy for Sensual Living: Essential Oils for the Ecstatic Soul
Erotic role-play is a powerful sexual outlet which can orgasmically release us from the shackles of convention and normality to express a side of ourselves we otherwise would not have opportunity to convey.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
I refuse to believe all men are pigs and women competing whores.-ANASTASIA
— Anastasia
There we go, I see a human and immediately ascribe to them a pronoun and a sexuality. Be the change.
— Mark William Lindberg, Queer on a Bench
I fell in love with the boy next door, and my own flesh became a thing I'd never really worn before. Sometimes, pressing my palms together, I thought I felt a magnetic field between them- something invisible but shaped, like sound, or heat, an egg of light, and it was thought I could hold the life force itself in my hands.
— Laura Kasischke, White Bird in a Blizzard
If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible.
— Leah Raeder, Black Iris
She exuded a raw, animal magnetism that left boys like me tongue-tied, and made men ignore their wives and crowd up close.
— Michael Schmicker, The Witch of Napoli
The whole point of my gender transition was to free myself up. If something feels good, I'm not going to stop doing it because it doesn't fit someone else's notion of what a man is. -David Harrison
— Carol Queen, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality
She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman’s monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens’s diaphragm – elegantly composed of nine shutter-leaf blades – to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of a Kegel pelvic floor exercise.
— David Cronenberg, Consumed
The flick of her hip is distilled erotica, a practiced sexuality.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
No matter how beautiful women are, they’re always worried that they aren’t attractive enough. They need to be reassured. A few don’t, but even they appreciate the attention.
— Michael Schmicker, The Witch of Napoli
My sexuality hasn't offended you. Me being me without your permission did.
— T.Taylor
I'm a flaming faggot, Irving. I was sure you were on to that. I don't go around waving the flag, of course, and I definitely do not proselytize. Homosexuality is, to me, an inner satisfaction, a pride in a heritage of greatness. To marry a woman would be an inadmissible rejection of my identity.
— Paddy Chayefsky, The Latent Heterosexual
The generative function is strictly nothing but an animal one, and can never be anything else. True spirituality demands its utter extirpation; and while its proper exercise for the continuation of the human race, in the semi-animal stage of its evolution, may not be considered sinful, its misuse, in any way, is fraught with the most terrible consequences physically, psychically and spiritually; and the forces connected with it are used for abnormal purposes only in the foulest practices of sorcery, the inevitable result of which is moral death—the annihilation of the individuality.
— James Morgan Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed
Gay male and lesbian culture is obsessed with purity of identity as the only basis for figuring out who you can trust or dance with. -Pat Califia
— Carol Queen, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality
...there are more models than the heterosexual one for a male and female who want to exchange erotic energy.
— Carol Queen, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality
Consider again the mated pair with which we began the chapter. Both partners, as selfish machines, ‘want’ sons and daughters in equal numbers. To this extent they agree. Where they disagree is in who is going to bear the brunt of the cost of rearing each one of those children. Each individual wants as many surviving children as possible. The less he or she is obliged to invest in any one of those children, the more children he or she can have. The obvious way to achieve this desirable state of affairs is to induce your sexual partner to invest more than his or her fair share of resources in each child, leaving you free to have other children with other partners. This would be a desirable strategy for either sex, but it is more difficult for the female to achieve. Since she starts by investing more than the male, in the form of her large, food-rich egg, a mother is already at the moment of conception ‘committed’ to each child more deeply than the father is. She stands to lose more if the child dies than the father does. More to the point, she would have to invest more than the father in the future in order to bring a new substitute child up to the same level of development. If she tried the tactic of leaving the father holding the baby, while she went off with another male, the father might, at relatively small cost to himself, retaliate by abandoning the baby too. Therefore, at least in the early stages of child development, if any abandoning is going to be done, it is likely to be the father who abandons the mother rather than the other way around. Similarly, females can be expected to invest more in children than males, not only at the outset, but throughout development. So, in mammals for example, it is the female who incubates the foetus in her own body, the female who makes the milk to suckle it when it is born, the female who bears the brunt of the load of bringing it up and protecting it. The female sex is exploited, and the fundamental evolutionary basis for the exploitation is the fact that eggs are larger than sperms.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
We have looked at some of the things that a female might do if she has been deserted by her mate. But these all have the air of making the best of a bad job. Is there anything a female can do to reduce the extent to which her mate exploits her in the first place? She has a strong card in her hand. She can refuse to copulate. She is in demand, in a seller's market. This is because she brings the dowry of a large, nutritious egg. A male who successfully copulates gains a valuable food reserve for his offspring. The female is potentially in a position to drive a hard bargain before she copulates. Once she has copulated she has played her ace — her egg has been committed to the male. It is all very well to talk about driving hard bargains, but we know very well it is not really like that. Is there any realistic way in which something equivalent to driving a hard bargain could evolve by natural selection? I shall consider two main possibilities, called the domestic-bliss strategy, the he-man strategy. The simplest version of the domestic-bliss strategy is this. The female looks the males over, and tries to spot signs of fidelity and domesticity in advance. There is bound to be variation in the population of males in their predisposition to be faithful husbands. If females could recognize such qualities in advance, they could benefit themselves by choosing males possessing them. One way for a female to do this is to play hard to get for a long time, to be coy. Any male who is not patient enough to wait until the female eventually consents to copulate is not likely to be a good bet as a faithful husband. By insisting on a long engagement period, a female weeds out casual suitors, and only finally copulates with a male who has proved his qualities of fidelity and perseverance in advance. Feminine coyness is in fact very common among animals, and so are prolonged courtship or engagement periods. As we have already seen, a long engagement can also benefit a male where there is a danger of his being duped into caring for another male's child.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love.
— Theodore Roethke
You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,’ I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never seen it before—actually, physically. It must make you very unhappy.
— Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus
Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act
— David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly
Sexuality is the only drive that is in itself hindered, perverted: simultaneously insufficient and excessive, with the excess as the form of appearance of the lack. On the one hand, sexuality is characterized by the universal capacity to provide the metaphorical meaning or innuendo of any activity or object–any element, including the most abstract reflection can be experienced as ‘alluding to that‘ (suffice it to recall the proverbial example of the adolescent who, in order to forget his sexual obsessions, takes refuge in pure mathematics and physics–whatever he does here again reminds him of ‘that’: how much volume is needed to fill out an empty cylinder? How much energy is discharged when two bodies collide?…). The universal surplus–this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience…is not the sign of preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outwards and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal.
— Slavoj Žižek
The journey was brutal, the results were glorious.
— Bruce Lengeman, To Kill A Lion
Sexuality is no longer about what you think:the genitals, it is now typically about your mentality. If a man feels he is a woman, so he is and vice versa.
— Oppong Amankwaa
The truest nature of a man comes out when he is sexually engaged
— Prabhukrishna M
To understand women who look both ways requires hearing their stories, not just noting the sex of their current partner. And when you listen closely, it's apparent these women have learned something crucial in these relationships.
— Jennifer Baumgardner
Sex is a three act play: foreplay, play and afterplay.
— Chloe Thurlow, Sophie's Secret
If sex is a journey, orgasm is the both the purpose and journey's end.
— Chloe Thurlow, Being a Girl
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.
— Young, Initiation
[Bisexuality] is seen as threatening the homosexual/heterosexual and male/female dichotomies, or binarisms, which underpin our gender and sexual identities to such a large extent. In the case of the first three stereotypes, there is a refusal even to acknowledge the existence of bisexuality. It is simply wished out of existence. You can either be homosexual or heterosexual but anything else is just a phase, just playacting, not real. As Udis-Kessler argues [‘Challenging the Stereotypes’, in Rose and Stevens (eds), Bisexual Horizons: Politics, Histories, Lives. 1996. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 45-57], this reflects an ideology of essentialism which dismisses the idea that sexuality may be fluid, not fixed, and that its forms can change over a person’s lifetime. This ideology assumes that there is a ‘true’ sexuality which we are working our way towards and that bisexuality is not really ‘true’ or ‘serious’ because it is a transition towards that other state… As Udis-Kessler points out, transitions are not a rehearsal for life. Life is a series of transitions: points of arrival become new points of departure, and vice versa. So why should we assume that the way we experienced our sexuality ten or twenty years ago is necessarily less ‘true’ or important than the way we experience it now, or that the way we experience it now will necessarily be the same in ten or twenty years time? Obviously this applies not only to bisexuality, but it is an argument which those - including some lesbian and gay activists - who accuse bisexuality of being a sort of ‘false consciousness’ seldom get to grips with… lesbians and gay men, anxious to create safe spaces where they are not subject to homophobic rejection or oppression, may (consciously or unconsciously) seek to exclude bisexuals[…].Unfortunately, as soon as this happens, as with every oppressed or stigmatised group, it can lead to others being oppressed or stigmatised in turn.
— Richard Dunphy, Sexual Politics
There is abundant scholarship which establishes that the delegitimation of homosexual desire and the production of the naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens, with the women respectably desexualized, is a process that is central to nation formation all over the globe.
— Nivedita Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist
[A]t least since the late nineteenth century when the primary role in categorising sexual behaviour and naming what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘perverse’ passed, in most industrial societies, from the religious to the medical and scientific professions, we have lived with the notion of distinct categories of people labelled ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. (The category ‘homosexual’ was coined by the Viennese writer Karol Benkert in 1869, ‘heterosexual’ emerging somewhat later.) Since that time, new discourses have tried to establish the male ‘homosexual’ as a distinct type of person - as opposed to same-sex attraction or same-sex acts being seen as a potential in everyone. As Peter Tatchell [‘It’s Just a Phase: Why Homosexuality is Doomed’, in Simpson (ed.), Anti-Gay, London: Cassell. 1996] puts it, ‘prior to that time … there were only homosexual acts, not homosexual people … [For] the medieval Catholic Church … homosexuality was not … the special sin of a unique class of people but a dangerous temptation to which any mortal might succumb. This doctrine implicitly conceded the attractiveness of same-sex desire, and unwittingly acknowledged its pervasive, universal potential
— Richard Dunphy, Sexual Politics
I don't switch much, don't really want many people to fuck me, because there's a whole code, unwritten but no less rigid than if it were chiseled in stone, about how Tops Must be, how Butches Must Be, and it does not include taking off one's pants. It does not include admitting to one's own desires, only quietly serving the desires of others. It certainly does not include taking a break once in a while to inhabit some other gender, role, or sensibility, even for half a delightful, sweaty hour, in the company of someone who feels like a mirror of me rather than a complementary piece I can fit myself against.
— S. Bear Bergman, Butch Is a Noun
Sensuality is beautiful, and dominance and submission in the right context is a passionate art. A muse which ignites the flame of femininity, enrapturing both partners in complete euphoria, magnifying both the masculine and the feminine in one tantalizing unit.
— Sai Marie Johnson
For the record, I do have genitals; and they are functional and aesthetically pleasing.
— Chuck Lorre
The failure of reorientation therapy is why the "ex-gay" ministry Exodus International shut down in 2013. It places gay Christians who adhere to the traditional biblical interpretation in an agonizing, irresolvable tension. In order to truly flee from sin as well as the temptation to sin, they must constantly attempt what has proven impossible: to reconstitute themselves so they are no longer sexual beings at all.
— Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships
We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow.She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.
— James Curcio, Party at the World’s End
She rubbed the skin off your headstone of a sternum and painted a sad picture of herself in your eyes. We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow.She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.
— James Curcio, Party at the World’s End
I was attracted to girly boys and boyish girls, or girls who later became boys. Boy were always going to be part of the equation.
— Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts
Even those fortunate ones among us who get sex right don’t necessarily feel compelled to talk about it. For all they know, everybody else is having the same experience. Sex being a naturally private act, we don’t share experiences with others the way we would about an especially good steakhouse.
— Michael Rittenhouse, Sex: What Your Parents Didn't Tell You
Far too many advocates rail against this or that sexual practice
—  few state clearly and explicitly what we are for.
If it isn't a choice,then it means you must be born a certain way,either gay or straight. If you are born that way,it must mean that god made you that way,which makes it unlikely that he would damn you to hell for it. After all,it would be technically his fault.
— Eileen Cook, What Would Emma Do?
A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
— Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 24 Vols
You didn’t,” she said in a resolute voice. “And you won’t in the future, because with each purging of your soul, your anger will subside until the only release you’ll need will be in my arms.
— Monica Burns, His Mistress
Intoxication, like sexual euphoria, is the privilege of the human animal.
— Roman Payne, The Wanderess
The effect of legalised prostitution on women outside prostitution is to lower the status of all women. Women are recognised by the state in this system as the appropriate objects of male penetration with no consideration for their personhood or pleasure. This teaches that the penetration and use of an unwilling woman is ‘sex’, an idea that lies at the root of sexual violence against women in general. There is no chance of developing a sexuality of equality in which women’s pleasure, right to say no, and bodily integrity are respected whilst the violence of prostitution is allowed to continue with state support for men’s behaviour.
— Sheila Jeffreys
A lot of female teachers do this - flirt with male students. I wonder if that's the only way they know how to interact with men. Like they use their sexuality to get what they want.
— Matthew Quick, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
IF YOU TRY TO RUN AWAY FROM ME AGAIN, I'LL FIND YOU EVEN IF YOU ARE IN HELL!" ~Larsson TIGER
— Pet Torres, Robbed Virginity
The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience.
— Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman
Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object his sexual desires; its grace may help him in the struggle; but the struggle remains. It will not satisfy him–as hunger may be kept off by regular meals. It will offer as many difficulties to the purity proper to that state, as it provides easements. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
I swung my hips around like I unscrewed at the waist.
— Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa
the most weird things about elders, they learned it on a quiet younger age & don't want us to.
— Srinivas Shenoy
The moral high ground proved to be one hell of an aphrodisiac...
— Eve A. Floriste, Fresh Cut: A Story of Despair and Flowers
Gender is not only women and sexual orientation has multiple choices.
— Gloria D. Gonsalves
Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness.” These folks left the film saying it was “amazing,” “marvellous,” incredibly funny,” worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.
— bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
Man often accords the sexual urge a merely biological significance and does not fully realize its true, existential significance - its link with existence. It is this link with the very existence of man and of the species Homo that gives the sexual urge its objective importance and meaning. This importance only emerges into consciousness when man is moved by love to take on himself the natural purpose of the sexual urge.
— Pope John Paul
Be at the aim of a gun, but you get out of Larsson TIGER's green eyes sight ...
— Pet Torres, Ardent Affection
Love makes temporary saints and poets of us all. We feel the source of life welling up inside us and long to express the joy it brings and share it with the partner of our heart’s awakening.
— John Maxwell Taylor, Eros Ascending: The Life-Transforming Power of Sacred Sexuality
Women are not wrong if they react instinctively – often jealously – against their partner’s interest in porn, since pornography is actually, neurologically, a woman’s destructive rival for her man’s sexual capabilities.
— Naomi Wolf, Vagina: A New Biography
He gave a wry smile. With all this vigilant vigils on virginity, you would think the country would have controlled its population by now.
— Mallika Nawal, I'm a Woman & I'm on SALE
I’m a virgin, okay?”There was a moment of silence while I assume he was struggling to understand the connection. Then he spoke. “I’m not prejudiced against anyone.
— Candice Raquel Lee, The Innocent: A Myth
My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses
— Beatrice Stella Campbell
It’s not easy for a young gay fabulous boy in Japan, I should know, that’s why I became a woman.” Momma Nakama
— Rochelle H. Ragnarok, The Boy with the Koi Tattoo
There is a supernal intelligence behind sexual arousal, the true purpose of which is to create for us ecstatic experiences of our own divinity.
— John Maxwell Taylor, Eros Ascending: The Life-Transforming Power of Sacred Sexuality
Wantonness might be sheer desperation, masking a suicidal self-debasement, but it might also represent a joyful, lusty sexuality that indicated, at heart, a vast generosity of spirit.
— Kathleen Norris, The Virgin of Bennington
I was in my early twenties and I was, to be quite honest, a bit of a punk. A swaggering entitled straight white guy who hadn't but a lot of thought into what it might be like to be anything other than a straight white guy. Because when you're a straight white guy, you don't *have* to think about that....
— Patrick Rothfuss
Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean.
— Thomas C. Oden, The Transforming Power of Grace
Know that I will think of you as a goddess even as I fuck you like a slut.
— Red Phoenix, Brie Submits to Her Master
See, sexuality is less about the actual act of having pretty good sex for seventeen minutes twice a week and much more about surrounding yourself with an ever simmering sensual energy, pulsing just underneath your daily life and infusing almost everything you do. It's like you're always just a little bit horny, just a little turned on, but the object of your gentle lust isn't just your lover, it's divine life itself.
— Sera J. Beak, The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark
Many things shaped my identity as a young boy: a strong selfworth (something that was instilled in all three Barrowman siblings by our parents), my immersion in theatre and music, and my DNA. I was born gay. It's not a choice I – or anyone else who is gay – made. If it were, why on earth would anyone choose to be part of a minority, part of a group that in so many cultures and countries, even in the twenty-first century, is regularly blasphemed, hounded and worse?
— John Barrowman, Anything Goes
I know what I am. I know that I've chosen to identify as a transgender woman, and that I am - by and large - happy with where I am in this world. I'm far from perfect, and I could give you a list as long as my arms of the things I'd love to change. Nevertheless, I am still here, and I am still me, and no one can change that without my permission.-Gwendolyn Ann Smith, "We're All Someone's Freak
— Kate Bornstein S. Bear Bergman
I don’t want to be labeled as one thing or another. In the past I’ve had successful relationships with men, and now I’m in this successful relationship with a woman. When it comes to love I am totally open. I don’t want to be put into a category, as in ‘I’m this’ or ‘I’m that.
— Amber Heard
No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: …there’s a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet." JG Ballard, 2004
— J.G. Ballard
It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks.
— Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
A husband or wife did not have the right either to demand sex from his or her spouse or to refuse it, and there was a catalogue of forbidden sexual practices, notably homosexuality, bestiality, certain sexual positions, masturbation, the use of aphrodisiacs, and oral sex, which could incur a penance of three years’ duration. Nor were people to make love on Sundays, holy days, or feast days, or during Lent, pregnancy, or menstruation. People believed that if these rules were disobeyed, deformed children or lepers might result.
— Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life
Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender id that, let's recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It's an amalgamation of bodies, identities, and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations, and behaviours, some of which develop organically, and others which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of saying that gender is any one single thing, let's start describing it as a holistic experience.
— Kate Bornstein S. Bear Bergman
After the dedication, Eleanor saw Bernard privately, probably at her own request. He came prepared to offer more spiritual comfort, thinking that she too might be suffering qualms of conscience over Vitry, but he was surprised to learn that she was not. Nevertheless, several matters were indeed troubling her, not the least the problems of her sister. She asked him to use his influence with the Pope to have the excommunication on Raoul and Petronilla lifted and their marriage recognised by the Church. In return, she would persuade Louis to make peace with Theobald of Champagne and recognise Pierre de la Chatre as Archbishop of Bourges.  Bernard was appalled at her brazen candour. In his opinion, these affairs were no business of a twenty-two-year-old woman. He was, in fact, terrified of women and their possible effects on him. An adolescent, first experiencing physical desire for a young girl, he had been so filled with self-disgust that he had jumped into a freezing cold pond & remained there until his erection subsided. He strongly disapproved of his sister, who had married a rich man; because she enjoyed her wealth, he thought of her as a whore, spawned by Satan to lure her husband from the paths of righteousness, and refused to have anything to do with her. Nor would he allow his monks any contact with their female relatives.  Now there stood before him the young, worldly, and disturbingly beautiful Queen of France, intent upon meddling in matters that were not her concern. Bernard's worst suspicions were confirmed: here, beyond doubt, was the source of that "Counsel of the Devil" that had urged the King on to disaster and plunged him into sin and guilt. His immediate reaction was to admonish Eleanor severely.
— Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life
And what if you're trying to knock out another man," she said, sarcastic. There was no expression in his cool blue eyes. "Then I kiss him," he said in the calmest of voices. "Now you try it.
— Anne Stuart, Cold As Ice
Veeva squirmed up and down the length of me, vibrating like a coin operated motel bed. When she stopped kissing my mouth, I said, "It sounds so great, Veeva. Just you and me with our brand new plastic surgery noses, running for our lives, hating each other’s guts... Both of us getting to look more and more like Michael Jackson every day.
— Dan Ahearn, Shoot the Moon
Why do they even call it that, "saving yourself"? Like we need to be rescued from sex? It's not like virgins spend their whole lives engaged in the sacred ceremony of "being saved" from intercourse.
— Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything
When you’re sure of what you want, I’ll be right here.
— Brigid Kemmerer, Breathless
Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)
— Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
Did you wake him?""If I say yes, will you spank me?"Syn rolled his eyes. "You're horrible, Mari.
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Cloak & Silence
You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse.
— Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own.
— Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography
The Kinsey staff asked questions of children, learning about sexuality in the family. And other psychologists, psychiatrists and paediatricians, including Benjamin Spock, explored this burgeoning field. As a result, it was known that children will naturally touch their genitals to experience a sense of pleasure. It was also known, from working with victims of childhood incest that small children will act in inappropriate sexual ways with adults if they are trained through abuse to do so. The methods used on Cheryl and the other 'lab rats' were meant to create an Alter personality that would both perform and tolerate sexual acts that are only appropriate for consenting adults. More important in their thinking, by limiting the experience to just one personality (ego state), the personality normally seen would behave like any other child who had not been sexually abused in any way.
— Cheryl Hersha, Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed To Kill For Their Country
Whatever influence Bullaro’s normally cautious character might have exerted over the passions of his penis were now nonexistent, and he unhesitatingly followed her and quickly undressed.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife
Intercourse was now forbidden to everyone but married people; bundling disappeared. In its place young courting couples engaged in "petting"--which, interpreted broadly, meant that they were could do anything sexual short of intercourse. Women were now held responsible for controlling men's beastly sexuality--halting them from simply plunging ahead--at the same time that they were expected to be sexually innocent: an impossible position.
— Leora Tanenbaum, Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
Men admitted to being endlessly fascinated with the naked female form; they appreciated women in a detached, impersonal way that women, even those women who were flattered by such attention, rarely understood.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife
Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud’s own views on ‘normality’ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud’s work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic’ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm’; but this is in no sense given by Nature.
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
in a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an “economic interest” in the continued role of women as “the provider of children for the state” and the performer of household chores without pay.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife
Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife
He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife
Abstaining from sex, hitting the books, and wearing loose-fitting clothes are common ways that girls try to molt their "slutty" image. But more often their shame leads them to self-destructive behavior. They become willing to do things that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing before they were scandalized because they now feel they have so little to offer. Some girls do drugs or drink to excess in an attempt to blot away their stigma. Others become depressed and anorexic. And others think so little of themselves that they date boys who insult or beat them.
— Leora Tanenbaum, Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.
— Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
The physical union of a man and a woman, in essence, is a supernatural act, a reminiscence of paradise, the most beautiful of all the hymns of praise dedicated to the Creator by the creature; it is the alpha and the omega of all creation.
— Samael Aun Weor, The Mystery of the Golden Blossom
To the non-initiate, whose experience of sexuality and bodily pleasure may be distorted by negative cultural conditioning, the introduction of sexuality into a sacred context is often mistakenly misconstrued as the ordinary pursuit of sex for recreation.
— Zeena Schreck
What kind of world have we built when it is more acceptable to ask for sex than a cuddle session? … Have we so stripped our sexuality of inherent value that it becomes the sacrificial lamb on the altar of connection, because everything else is too precious to risk? I'm the first one to say that my body is an amusement park, and I like to have fun with it – and let other people ride it – but there is still a divinity in it. It is no less precious than our fears, our smiles, our hopes, our tears. And this goes not just for women, but for all people. I've known men and dominants who felt they could be vulnerable only during sex, and so they would ask for that instead of talking about what was bothering them, or even simply as a distraction from their own thoughts and troubles.
— Kacie Cunningham, Conquer Me: Girl-To-Girl Wisdom About Fulfilling Your Submissive Desires
While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife
Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit.
— Morris West, The Devil's Advocate
Tanned, toned, curves in the right places and that small waist…lips, hair, eyes all packaged up like a siren. If she’s a siren, I heard her call, and I’m diving in hook, line, and sinker. - Drew Donovan
— Kailin Gow, Falling for Summer (Donovan Brothers #1)
If there was ever a dress that can be an aphrodisiac the one Serena was wearing now had to be it
— Kailin Gow, The Protege
Sexuality is general, and although only one man may be receiving the favors of a woman, all men in her presence are warm. That's the great generosity of women and the great generosity of the creator who worked it out that way, that there are no unilateral agreements of sexuality.
— Leonard Cohen
Sexual pleasure is a legitimate right of the human being.
— Samael Aun Weor, The Three Mountains: The Autobiography of Samael Aun Weor
How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?
— Thomas Mann, Briefe an Otto Grautoff, 1894 1901, und Ida Boy Ed, 1903 1928
...the controlling of the sex nature builds up a reservoir of strength, and it is this strength that opens the door to the Innermost.
— (None Given) M, The Dayspring of Youth
To some extent a life of celibacy is a picture of how all of us are to live, containing our passions for God’s purposes.
— Eric Metaxas
Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity-known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision- evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women’s confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife
Recently she had become intrigued by the admiring glances of other women. The admiration of her own sex existed on a higher and more intense plane than anything men could offer, like the romantic rivalries of sisters. Together, women formed a conspiracy of glances entirely exchanged behind the backs of their menfolk.
— J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women
The penis, often regarded as a weapon, is also a burden, the male curse.
— Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife