c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Spiritualizing sex is actually a movement of energy—feeling and emotion—that rises within you and moves into your sexual physicality as an alive, tender, erotic, or passionate expression. Your bodies move without inhibition so all the energy can flow out of you and between the two of you. You allow spiritual energy to express its dance through you. Sexuality can be a profound demonstration of your love, and especially your freedom, to express and bond. Spiritual sex, then, combines how you express your love with the intentions or blessings you bring to your partnership.
— Alexandra Katehakis, Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot, Healthy Sex While in Recovery from Sex Addiction
I've been called promiscuous. Not a pretty word, is it? Makes you think of the gloop that comes out of your nose or what comes up your throat when you're gagging, if you're trying to swallow down something you didn't necessarily mean to swallow. Promiscuous: your face has to pucker when you say it.I prefer to think of myself as an adventurer. Charting the souls of so many of god's creatures, and of the floaty beings that populate the land of notions. It's a job. It's a calling. It takes strong thigh muscles, intelligence, cunning, a good pair of boots. It takes heart, in fact. The heart to stay on. To not be defeated.
— Sylvia Brownrigg, Ten Women Who Shook The World
We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.
— Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities
It angered him that his sexuality was an issue at all. As far as he was concerned, who he decided to sleep with was his business alone.
— Christina Westover, Precipice
You are the evil scientist of your desires. - Ignacio Rivera
— Tristan Taormino, The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge
When women's sexuality is imagined to be passive or "dirty," it also means that men's sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right-no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men's minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we're encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that's detrimental to both men and women.
— Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women
No matter what those sex-ed teachers say about how great condoms are, there's not a condom in the world to protect you from heartbreak.
— Natasha Friend, For Keeps
My bisexuality is part of the expression of the flexibility, the changeability of my spirit that feels essential and precious to the center of my life. My bisexuality is a part of my desire to remain an outsider, to be able to "pass" into polarized worlds, to abandon expectation, to honor the mystery of being. My bisexuality is a celebration of the ever-opening flesh, the expansive, fluid mirror of social discourse.
— Michelle T. Clinton
Anyone who doesn't want you to be happy with who you are is an asshole. Fuck pleasing everyone else. You only live once. Who are you gonna do it for?
— Dahlia Adler, Under the Lights
She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.
— Amos Oz
I don't think wood was discovered in Britain until the 1970's. That's when I discovered it anyway.
— Craig Ferguson
Physical attraction was about aesthetics, not sexual performance, not mental stimulation. Without a mental connection, a remarkable sexual performance yielded no lifelong guarantees. It was only lust. And lust was not love.
— Eric Jerome Dickey, Pleasure
Hey, God made us sexual creatures. If he wanted teenagers to wait that long, he would have made puberty start at twenty-five.
— Natasha Friend, For Keeps
We tend to treat labels as real, rather than as representations of reality
— DeWight R. Middleton
Sexuality should not be seen as dualistic – all good or all bad – but as a good part of our created nature that is constantly in need of repair.
— David Kinnaman, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters
I deserved to find pleasure that surpassed my imagination, better than any I had experienced.
— Eric Jerome Dickey, Pleasure
Guys hung out all the time. It didn’t mean they were gay. But when you are gay, you automatically think everybody knows and wonder if you’re safe.
— Sean Kennedy, Tigers and Devils
It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer.'So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and he must tactfully let themselves and each other die?''Let them die,' he repeated.I had accompanied him as far as the revolving glass door of the lobby.'Let them die,' he said again. 'It's less dangerous. I can swear on my word of honor that I never gave a present or made a loan or an exchange of anything except . . . this . . .'He waved both hands in a complicated gesture which fleetingly indicated his chest, his mouth, his genitals, his thighs. Thanks no doubt to my fatigue, I was reminded of an animal standing on its hind legs and unwinding the invisible. Then he resumed his strictly human significance, opened the door, and easily mingled with the night outside, where the sea was already a little paler than the sky.
— Colette, The Pure and the Impure
What all of this suggests is that we need a more complex understandingof identities. If we identify on the basis of race, class, sexuality, orgender alone we cannot make sense of the ways these identificationscombine and change over time. The used-to-be-working class nowprofessional woman, the woman of mixed racial parentage who appearswhite, the divorced mother who is now a lesbian, the former lesbian whois now straight, or the former lesbian who is now a man. Identities arealways in motion; they are mobile (Ferguson, 1993). This is particularlythe case for those who have been placed in identity categories that do notquite seem to fit; it is also true of many more of us, in varied ways. Justask our current President, whose own origin story, of which he has spokenand written eloquently, is exceedingly complex. We need, I believe, aconception of identities that embraces this complexity, that takes intoaccount temporality and also specificity.
— Arlene Stein
Fear triggers the fight-or-flight response, fueled by adrenaline, which, as it turns out, is chemically related to amphetamines. Granted, it's a very different kind of high for mindfuckers: not a mellow, floaty "my vulva is one with the universe" high but a jittery, revved-up "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck" kind of high. Endorphins are like great downers but adrenaline is uppers all the way. And it's just as addictive. Don't believe me? Go ask anyone who likes to jump off bridges or out of airplanes. - Edge
— Tristan Taormino, The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge
A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain - I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would've destroyed myself. And a wise old queen - Bobo, we called her - taught me that I had a duty to live and bear my burden proudly for all to see. Poor Bobo came to a sticky end - he was riding in the Duke Devanche's Hispano Suissa when his falling hemorrhoids blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe skin upholstry. Even the eyes and the brain went with a horrible "shlupping" sound. The Duke says he would carry that ghastly "shlup" with him to his mausoleum.
— William S. Burroughs, Queer
So tell me, Jane, are you cold?” His lips brushed hers and he said through a hot breath, “Or turned on?
— Rachel Gibson, See Jane Score
...there was a natural comorbidity between sexual appetite and sexual jealousy, between the desire to fuck and the desire to kill.
— M. Thomas Gammarino, Big in Japan: A (Hungry) Ghost Story
The physical stage of bonding is at its most powerful when all other forms of bonding have been achieved. If this has been done, the final petals of the flower have reached full maturity and unfold, leaving no restriction for pleasure, physical or otherwise. Having learned your partner and when to push, pull away or work together in fluid unison; having learned what enthuses and delights their senses, you are prepared to carry all of this knowledge into the sweet cadence of your unity.
— Shykia Bell, CAMILEON: Beyond The Veil
Thank goodness it wasn't real sex.
— Lana Cox, Dirty College: Real Sex Education
I'm fairly fond of boys, but my preference is for girls; When I have enough of a girl, she serves me still as a boy.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's Roman Elegies and Venetian Epigrams
I've always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that its merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.
— Elizabeth  George
He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had always experienced that knee-jerk reaction to being reduced - if only momentarily - to skin, bone, and testosterone.
— Elizabeth  George
Maybe he likes the look of Mae," Nick drawled."Don't be ridiculous."Nick raised his eyebrows. "Does he like the look of Jamie?
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Lexicon
...Fate forced me to become a two-man woman. But there was no effing way I could be a four-man woman.Even metaphysics couldn't keep that from being whorey.
— Sierra Dean, A Bloody Good Secret
The abstinence-only programs and reclaimed-virginity movement make men and women ashamed of being sexual creatures before or outside of marriage.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Since you dismissed your maid,” he said, “I suppose it will be up to me to undress you.”“That is most chivalrous of you, my lord.
— Julianne MacLean, Love According to Lily
We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn't customary to say, "Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I'm going to go masturbate.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
orgasm for women like coal( that takes lot of time to get heat) , and men like microwave..just push the button
— Anshu
Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
— Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties
... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.
— Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties
Human language can only work in broad categories. We create words for things, even though words have a danger of confining things. People will always be bigger than the words we use to describe them, and words will always have the tendency to give us narrow views. But this danger shouldn’t keep us from using words. I am a man; I am American; I am single; I am 5’10”; I am hungry; I am tired: I am happy: I am sad; I am studious; I am foolish; I am fallen; I am sinful; I am hopeful; I am inquisitive; and I am gay. I’m not just any one of these things, but I am all of these things. You could ask me to not categorize myself in terms of my sexual identity because I am not just my sexuality; but if you’re going to do that, you might as well not ask me to categorize myself at all.
— Chris Damian
We must bear in mind, however sadly, that psychopathology is no longer the exclusive preserve of the degenerate and perverse. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra -these are games that anyone can play. Their violence, and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place now, within sex as elsewere (...). Were all this leads one can only speculate (...). What will follow is the psychopathology of sex, relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations.
— Ballard James G.
People sometimes tells me that they're baffled by bisexuality. They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn't. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else.
— Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply
Because it is such a powerful force in the world today, the Western Judeo-Christian tradition is often accepted as the arbiter of 'natural' behavior of humans. If Europeans and their descendant nations of North America accept something as normal, then anything different is seen as abnormal. Such a view ignores the great diversity of human experience.
— Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture
What's the best way to say because it's too embarrassing to talk to a crush about sex and read an explicit thing they wrote while they're right there?
— C.B. Lee, Not Your Sidekick
In retrospect, I suppose it might be difficult to develop early as a girl. Guys talking to your chest rather than your face is one thing. Then you’re also surrounded by a bunch of girls with pre- adolescent bodies who wrongly think that no breasts and no ass are a good thing. Plus, if you own your sexuality at all as a teen girl you’re a slut with a capital S. God, I’m glad those days are over. Not like adulthood is void of sexist platitudes, it’s just easier to talk about. In high school, though, if you call someone out on their shit you get bullied. It’s really a horrible time in life. Honestly, I don’t even know why there is an entire genre of books dedicated to it.
— Sage Steadman, Ann, Not Annie
... so I leaned down and put my mouth on him.He jerked at the contact with a barked, “Shit,” and I laughed around him, even as I took him deeper into my mouth.His hands were now fisted in the sheets, white-knuckled as I slid my tongue over him, grazing slightly with my teeth. His groan was fire to my blood.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury
So I never told you about my sexual orientation - it means we were never close friends. My body my business.
— S.C. Silver, The B Word: The B in LBGTQ Poetry
At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.
— Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex
I came to therapy thinking that my sexuality didn’t matter, but it turned out that every part of my personality was intimately connected. Cutting one piece damaged the rest.
— Garrard Conley
Nanotechnology promises many advances in the field of kinky sex enhancement compared with the present. Nanobots will replace surgery as the preferred method of modifying the appearance and function of the human body, allowing tissue reduction, regrowth, augmentation, and reshaping.
— J.R. Scott, Tales of High-Tech Female Dominance Volume II: Nanobots
Mystical organizations are only a crystallization of facts which can be found, in a more diffuse and less tangible form, in all strata of people. The degree of mystical, sentimental and sadistic feelings corresponds exactly to the degree of the disturbance of natural orgastic experience. Close observation of the audience of a trashy thriller or of a boxing match teaches more about these problems than a hundred handbooks of sexology.
— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Our sexuality affects everything we do, and everything affects our sexuality. The same is true of our spirituality -- that which is most deeply meaningful to us. We can deny both. But denying them does not mean they are not both alive in every breath and heartbeat of life.
— Tina Schermer Sellers, Sex, God, and the Conservative Church: Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy
Because what she disliked in men was not their eroticism, but their assumption that women had none. Which left women with nothing to be but housemaids.
— Marian Engel, Bear
The historical record demonstrates that, on the contrary, many homosexuals chose heterosexuality and failed to maintain it because choice is less powerful than destiny.
— Rictor Norton, The Myth Of The Modern Homosexual: Queer History And The Search For Cultural Unity
Sexual thoughts float through a man’s brain many times a day, while on the contrary a woman has them only one to four times a day.
— Abhijit Naskar, Neurosutra: The Abhijit Naskar Collection
When gender non-conforming people cross paths with sexually confused and repressed people, shit hits the fan.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
At first the brain weighs a potential partner, and if the partner fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It's the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.
— Abhijit Naskar, What is Mind?
Violent … check! Dominant … check! Predatory … check! Unable to control deviant sexual urges … check, check, check! Perhaps I will write a case study.
— Jamie Le Fay, Escape
My advice to any girl ... read and learn about sexuality and surround yourself with people who you can talk to and who can support you through your journey. Be comfortable with who you are. Connect with others as you get to discover you are not alone. Don't suffocate yourself ...
— Rena Otieno
Not maybe. Definitely! We have an expression back home in Haiti, which says something like ‘a man who is thinking with his penis.’ That is what you are Michael. That doesn’t mean that you are addicted to sex or pornography. You are not a pervert of any kind. Contrary! You are just too sensitive with women. You fall in love at the blink of an eye and all your decisions are based on your passions towards a particular woman. Your mind gets blurry because not enough blood goes to your brain. And your heart pumps all the blood back to your penis and that is why you are a man who thinks with his penis.” (Ch.7)
— Stevan V. Nikolic, Truth According to Michael
In the Buddhist tradition, we speak of the oneness of the body and mind. Whate very happens to the body also happens to the mind....This is a very important encounter (engaging in sex) , not to be done in a casual manner.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ
The assertion that there are an infinite number of homosexualities is a political statement rather than an observable fact.
— Rictor Norton, The Myth Of The Modern Homosexual: Queer History And The Search For Cultural Unity
Away from home, my partner and I are on holiday on a resort on an island. Mealtimes bring everyone together. We enter the dining room, where we face many tables places alongside each other… I face what seems like a shocking image. In front of me, on the tables, couples are seated. Table after table, couple after couple, taking the same form: one many sitting by one woman around a ‘round table,’ facing each other 'over’ the table… I am shocked by the sheer force of the regularity of that which is familiar: how each table presents the same form of sociality as the form of the heterosexual couple. How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?
— Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
[H]ow the force of one's adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life.
— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
If sexual physiology provides the pattern for our experience of the world, what is woman's basic metaphor? It is mystery, the hidden. Karen Horney speaks of a girl's inability to see her genitals and a boy's ability to see his as the source of "the greater subjectivity of women as compared with the greater objectivity of men." To rephrase this with my different emphasis: men's delusional certitude that objectivity is possible is based on the visibility of their genitals. Second, this certitude is a defensive swerve from the anxiety-inducing invisibility of the womb. Women tend to be more realistic and less obsessional because of their toleration for ambiguity which they learn from their inability to learn about their own bodies. Women accept limited knowledge as their natural condition, a great human truth that a man may take a lifetime to reach.The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
I am sorrowful. I am sorrowful that I happened to be born into a world where being disgusted with yourself was what you were supposed to be. I am sorrowful that my fellow countrymen feel that being human is something to repress, something ugly, something nasty. It's... It's just a fucking shame. It really is.I am penitent. I am penitent for all the relationships this shame has ruined. I am penitent that I've allowed my shame and unhappiness to spread to others. I've fucked men and I've fucked women, Father Kolkan. I have sucked numerous pricks, and I have had my pricked sucked by numerous people. I have fucked and been fucked. And it was lovely, really lovely. I had an excellent time doing it, and I would gladly do it again. I really would. I have been lucky enough to find and meet and come to hold beautiful people in my arms - honestly, some beautiful, lovely, brilliant people - and I am filled with regret that my awful self-hate drove them
— Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs
Physiologically, the union of two opposites is a pleasurable affair. Why should the psyche be any different?
— Anthony Marais
I get the concept, all right -- like, why would God make me gay and then tell me it's a sin to be gay? But the freethinkers were confusing me. ' I don't get it. They have no religion, but they sort of believe in God, but they don't believe in faith?
— Robin Reardon, Thinking Straight
There is nothing quite so sexy as good old fashioned enthusiasm.
— R.A.Delmonico
Chubby chasers don't prove that fat is beautiful. Chubby chasers show us that ugliness is optional.
— Dan Oliverio, The Round World: Life at the Intersection of Love, Sex, and Fat
I am sorrowful. I am sorrowful that I happened to be born into a world where being disgusted with yourself was what you were supposed to be. I am sorrowful that my fellow countrymen feel that being human is something to repress, something ugly, something nasty. It's... It's just a fucking shame. It really is.I am penitent. I am penitent for all the relationships this shame has ruined. I am penitent that I've allowed my shame and unhappiness to spread to others. I've fucked men and I've fucked woman, Father Kolkan. I have sucked numerous pricks, and I have had my pricked sucked by numerous people. I have fucked and been fucked. And it was lovely, really lovely. I had an excellent time doing it, and I would gladly do it again. I really would. I have been lucky enough to find and meet and come to hold beautiful people in my arms - honestly, some beautiful, lovely, brilliant people - and I am filled with regret that my awful self-hate drove them
— Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs
A man in cahoots with a woman’s sexual instinct was the devil himself, for he had the united power over her—himself and her own longing—greater than a mere man
— Judith Ivory, Untie My Heart
As survivors, we’ve been conditioned to be victims sexually. Many of us have never learned to say no or to set limits on our sexual activities...To heal, it’s important that we take control, that we make active choices concerning if, when, and how we want to explore sexuality. Especially in the beginning, you need to put your own needs about sex ahead of anyone else’s.
— Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
You," Seven pronounced, "are a train wreck of sexual history."But this is inaccurate. A runaway train is an accident. Me, I'll jump in front of the tracks. I'll even tie myself down in front of the speeding engine. There's some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
So, no, this conversation is about gender. Some people will say, "Oh, but women have the real power: bottom power." (This is a Nigerian expression for a woman who uses her sexuality to get things from men.) But bottom power is not power at all, because the woman with bottom power is actually not powerful; she just has a good route to tap another person's power. And then what happens if the man is in a bad mood or sick or temporarily impotent?
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
The way I would choose to identify myself wouldn’t be gay. I’ve been attracted mostly to ‘shes’ but I’ve been with many people and I’m open to love wherever it can be.
— Ezra Miller
Some days I feel more comfortable using sexuality in my work, and then some days I feel like being a little more reserved. I think that’s why I’m in the middle of this whole conversation of, what is she? Is she a good girl or is she a bad girl? I think that I’m both. I don’t need to be either. I don’t need to be a pop princess who is America’s sweetheart or the next rebellious, wild, young thing. I don’t need to pick or choose. I can show skin and swear like a sailor but also be a good role model. I think that I’m a good person. I don’t think cursing makes you a bad person. I don’t think showing skin or kissing boys makes you a bad person. I don’t think that expressing sexuality makes you a bad person at all. I don’t think that’s bad… I think it’s great!
— Ariana Grande
There is nothing mixed up about a woman who loves women, who wants to have sex with them, or who identifies as a lesbian. It is society that is mixed up because it punishes people for not conforming to its gender stereotypes.
— Edward Stein, Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy
Fetishizing is the norm for males, not for females.
— Robert Stoller
Remember, breasts don't sag as we get older, they relax.
— Marty Klein
Nothing is better than sex and nothing is exactly like it.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
I fucking hate it, the idea that something like that would be trivialized down to a fucking hashtag. I mean, there's a ton of biphobia — people refuse to accept bisexuality as an actual sexuality. And I'm biracial, but also white-passing, which is a unique perspective. So these kids say, like, "Oh, fucking tri-bi Halsey! She'll never miss an opportunity to talk about it!" I want to sit them down like a mom and go, "Six months ago you were begging for an artist that would talk about this shit! But then I do, and you say, 'Oh, not her. Someone else.
— Ashley Frangipane
I fall in love with human beings based on who they are, not based on what they do or what sex they are.
— Shailene Woodley
We don’t ask when people age out of singing, or eating ice cream; why would we stop making love?
— Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism
I feel like there’s a genuine hole in me. The little death, almost. I need stimulation. I used to need physical stimulation constantly, whether that be from listening to the sound of my own voice, or flirting with guys or girls. I’m not bisexual, but that moment when you realise someone likes you – it’s the best feeling in the world. If you could bottle it..
— Matt Healy
I have a friend [whose] mom is very, very Christian and crazy religious…She’s like that for all the wrong reasons and isn’t actually true to her word. She doesn’t practice what she preaches. The things she does preach, she contradicts them all the time. She can be really hypocritical. It went out to her and anybody else like that…A lot of our fans are having issues with loving themselves and coming to terms with their sexuality…A lot of those kids have a really tough home life where their families are exactly like the people I’m talking about in ‘Holy.’ They’ve really latched onto that one because that’s the life they have to deal with and the people they’ve had to deal with. I think everyone knows people like that
— Lynn Gunn
Nowhere is ageism more sexist, and vicious, than in the domain of sexuality.
— Ashton Applewhite, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism
Girls who like each other have a different energy. More intense. Furtive. They're part of a secret world. They speak in code, like spies. Everything has a hidden meaning.
— Leah Reader
How you identify or what you prefer in the bedroom does not define your goals, dreams or interests, and has no baring on who you are as a human being, You don’t need to dress or behave a certain way because of your sexual orientation if you don’t want to. Trust that there are groups and resources out there that will support you no matter what. I know that I certainly appreciate all of my fans equally!
— Natasha Negovanlis
Rilke wrote in one of my favourite books [Letters to a Young Poet], “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” It takes courage to live as our true selves; especially when doing so can be faced with such unkindness. But I believe the more we show of ourselves, the more we make space for positive change in the world. I feel so grateful I get to be a part of a series that is contributing to that change.
— Elise Bauman
In writing the history of a life I believe absolutely that the reader cannot understand the character and deeds of the subject unless he is given a basic understanding of that person's sexual loves and hates and conflicts. It is the only way the reader can make sense out of innumerable apparently senseless actions.
— Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood
Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination.
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
Then he say something that really surprise me cause it so thoughtful and common sense. When it come to what folks do together with they bodies, he say, anybody's guess is as good as mine. But when you talk about love I don't have to guess. I have love and I have been love. And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Human brains have three layers of programming. Each layer adds a twist or turn to sexual preferences and tendencies. The first layer is genetic progamming from the inherited genes. The second involves environmental influences that impact genes and their expression. The third level deals with the way we "fill in the blanks" as social and cultural beings. This level can become a feedback loop that influences the inherited genes by influencing with whom we choose to have sex.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
We have multiple sex maps - form genetic and epigenetic influences that are largely out of our consciousness to social and cultural influences that may or may not be within our awareness. We are a social and biological species with sexual patterns and tendencies that exist independent of any religion. Religion attempts to force sex into a one-size-fits-all box, placing a layer of complexity on sexuality that is neither realistic nor related to the biological roots of our species.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Genetics and epigenetics are far more important in sexuality than any idea of choice. No evidence has been found that anyone chooses their sexuality. Choice is a theological concept, not a biological one.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
[T]he more educated and financially successful, the less religious a person is likely to be. The opposite is also generally true; the more religious, the less educated and financially stable.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
A weaker sex drive is at the basis of female superiority.
— Adam Leonas, The Empress Is Naked: From Female Privilege to Gender Equality and Social Liberation
People don't learn about their sexuality from books or discussions
—  they learn mostly from personal experience in bed with themselves or someone else.
The more a religion makes a person feel guilty and insecure, the harder the person works for the religion.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
Sometimes Yoel had the feeling that it was not his sexual organ but his whole being that was penetrating and luxuriating inside her womb. That he was entirety wrapped up and quivering inside her. Until with each caress the difference between caresser and caressed vanished, as though they had ceased being a man and a woman making love and had become one flesh.
— Amos Oz, To Know A Woman
Love is not the middle ear from which the voice resounds, but rather the voice itself; in our bodies a body of emanations.
— Candice Favilla, Cups: Poems
Islam began as a tribal religion, whereas Christianity began more as an individual or family religion. Christianity struck out from Palestine, converting one person or one family at a time. After the initial successes and conquests by Mohammed and his tribe, conversions were as much military as spiritual. Mohammed was both a political and military genius and used his success and charisma to convince the superstitious tribes around him that he had Allah on his side. As such, the sword was the instrument of persuasion.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
I was shut off from my body; I had barely thought about sexuality or longing. Up until this point, my sexual experiences had felt business like or even transactional...I hadn't been suppressing urges or denying my needs. I didn't feel like I had any, not corporeal ones. My journal entries from that time speak to depression and feelings of isolation, fears that a friend would leave, a sense that I had been responsible for my mother's departure and would therefore cause anyone I loved or needed to leave. I was still spending most of my time in my head. I was removed from my own feelings.
— Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
Love was a desire to cling to something difficult to get hold of in day-to-day life. It needed more attention and dedication, not always pleasurable, she concluded. Sensuality was by far easy, like food.
— Anuradha Bhattacharyya, One Word
The younger a religious person is when she gets married, the less she understands and knows about her sexuality. Add to this the incredible fear of talking about sexual fantasies, masturbation, experimentation and pornography, and a young adult enters a marriage with a serious handicap that can inhibit sexual development for life.Such people have no template for communication except through their guilt-based training.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
(...) I think your definition changes based on your experiences." (age twenty-two, bisexual)Six years later, this same woman noted:"I date both men and women, but i don't like the word "bisexual", because I think it implies polarity. I guess I started thinking about this around 4 1/2 years ago, when I was involved in a long-term committed relationship with a man, but a queer man. And it made me redefine things, because I didn't believe that a queer man and a queer woman together in a relationship like ours was conventionally heterosexual." (age twenty-eight, bisexual)
— Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire
Antigay activists have historically maintained that same-sex sexuality is a lifestyle choice that should be discouraged, deemed illegitimate, and even punished by the culture at large. In other words, if lesbian/gay/bisexual people to not have to be gay but are simply choosing a path of decadence and deviance, then the government should have no obligation to protect their civil rights or honor their relationships; to the contrary, the state should actively condemn same-sex sexuality and deny it legal and social recognition in order to discourage others from following that path.Not surprisingly, advocates for gay/lesbian/bisexual rights see things differently. They counter that sexual orientation is not a matter of choice but an inborn trait that is much beyond an individual's control as skin or eye color. Accordingly, since gay/lesbian/bisexual individuals cannot choose to be heterosexual, it is unethical to discriminate against them and to deny legal recognition to same-sex relationships.(...)Perhaps instead of arguing that gay/lesbian/bisexual individuals deserve civil rights because they are powerless to change their behavior, we should affirm the fundamental rights of all people to determine their own emotional and sexual lives.
— Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire
Like the pagans of old, unaffected by climate, the British were now dancing around a giant phallus. Unlike the pagans theirs was a sterile phallus, disarmed by condoms and pills - the first heathen sexual cult to be based around sterility rather than fertility.
— Peter Hitchens
Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.
— Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories
I'm a master at setting people off...' accounting my sexual history and scope of experience
—  surrendering
For those of us who question, your whole life becomes a question. Do you then reach some level of understanding, and then it's static? I don't think so" (age twenty-two, unlabeled)
— Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire
Although most of the women I interviewed felt that their sexualattractions paralleled their emotional attachments, this was not alwaysthe case. In fact, women reported that on average, the percentageof physical same-sex attractions they experienced differedfrom their emotional same-sex attractions by about 15 percentagepoints in either direction (in other words, some women were moreemotionally than physically drawn to women, whereas others weremore physically than emotionally drawn). A small number ofwomen reported discrepancies of up to 40 percentage points.Like women with nonexclusive attractions, women with significantgaps between their emotional and physical feelings oftenfaced challenges in selecting a comfortable identity label. They hadto decide whether their sexual identity was better categorized bypatterns of “love” or patterns of “lust,” and they had to forecastwhat sort of relationships they might desire in the future. Manyof these women found it difficult to make these determinations.Sue, for example, felt that her attractions were riddled withcontradictions: “I prefer to make out with men, but the idea of havingsex with a man utterly repulses me. I would, however, like tomarry a woman, and that’s who I want to make a long-term commitmentto.
— Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire
Compulsory heterosexuality produces not the homosexual but differences, conflicts and hierarchies among homosexualities at the level of identity, culture, and politics.
— Steven Seidman
Sex is a metaphor for everything else and everything is a metaphor for sex as well. Because sex is a coming together of two weather patterns, two separate countries, two entities in a conscious state of potentially blissful crisis. Or chaos, or harmony. You’re not quite sure what’s going to happen, but it is the most catastrophic, exciting, and weakening thing that can happen to us. If we are personally involved in it, every fiber of our being is made self-conscious, or is encourages to unify on some level with others. We are delicate. We bring our damage to sexuality, we bring our hopes, we bring our self-image, we bring our world-image, we bring what we believe we are/what we believe we aren’t, our blind spots, our prejudices, our sadness. Everything comes out. A lot of people are left wanting, and confusing, and having the idea that their body is like an unloved apartment building; it’s up for grabs and it’s of absolutely no worth. If we feel that way about ourselves and if we feel that way about others, then of course, sex is nothing more than a lot of rubbing and some kind of release. But the more we are, the more we can feel, the more we can empathize, the more human we are.
— Melinda Gebbie
Describing my sexual history and scope of experience
—  am surrendering
Sex is about anticipation not culmination.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Deep down many of us experience a vast discrepancy between what we're taught we should feel about sex and how we actually feel.
— Antonia Hall, The Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life
The soul is not a bird, is not a tree, but a restraining wire of light wrapped around the other we most desire. We can't even give them away, these souls, their encumbrances not ours alone.
— Candice Favilla
Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
I can see where this is going, too. Of course, I can, because I am Alex as well. But I want to dress up in gorgeous clothes and strut up and down the runway like they do in the magazines, swishing my tail. I want to dress up with Amina and Julia and giggle and be girlfriends, arm in arm. I want to be beautiful. I want other people to think I am beautiful.
— Alyssa Brugman, Alex As Well
I can understand why you would want to be literally out of your own heard, because being inside your own head is unbearable.
— Alyssa Brugman, Alex As Well
Do you want me to lick you again?
— Alyssa Brugman, Alex As Well
Adult males in modern society who feel fulfilled in giving concern and tuition to boys and youths are portrayed as being interested only in boys' bodies (though this may be a small part of the attraction) and are spurned and traduced as sexual monsters. I believe we reap the harvest of ours hysterical and homophobia today in juvenile crime, drug use and delinquency. Consider the ethical training which boys and youths gained through shudo in Japan or in the system in Classical Greece, the tuition in manners, customs and humanity, the degree of civilised values imparted to them, the ideas of loyalty, honour and truthfulness; this highly personalised education with love and sensuality at its centre must be far more effective than any other. We in the West are bigoted fools to dismiss it with such horror.
— Colin Spencer
Sometimes I don't know what I am. But what I would like to be on the outside -- what I want other people to see -- is a girl.
— Alyssa Brugman, Alex As Well
How fair is it to judge a person based on his sexual preferences, or their ‘otherness’? As long as a person is not ‘harmful’ for others or not violating the rights of others, I think we need not be bothered about their personal lives, whom they love or whom they marry. It is a personal choice. I think the most important thing about a person is his or her ‘humanity’, kindness, selflessness not their ‘sex life’ (only as long as he or she is not violating the rights of others or causing harm to others).It is entirely a disgrace on humanity to ‘discriminate’ a person solely based on their ‘otherness’. I am surprised to see how the society stands against or make fun out of ‘gay’ people, who are totally harmless, ignoring the ‘human’ in them, but feel ‘OK’ with ‘rapists’, ‘sex maniacs’, ‘prostitution’ and ‘sexual violence against women and children’ occurring in Sri Lanka every day.
— Ama H. Vanniarachchy
For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.
— Larry Kramer, Faggots
To Tengo, sexual desire was fundamentally an extension of a means of communication. And so, to look for sexual desire in a place where there was no possibility of communication seemed inappropriate to him.
— Haruki Murakami
Honey, there is no one right way to eat cannelloni.
— Alyssa Brugman, Alex As Well
Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.
— Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light—it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown, cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole.
— Esther Perel