quotations about sex
Sex is the ... tremulous and bewildering and nerve-racking and delicious and myriad-adjectived soul-condition ... generally known as love. Ninety-nine point nine repeater percent of the world's literature has been devoted to its analysis. It's therefore of some importance.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Mountebank
Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
The Folding Star
Part of the sexual revolution is bringing rationality to sexuality -- because when you don't embrace sexuality in a normal way, you get the twisted kinds, and the kinds that destroy lives.
HUGH HEFNER
interview, NPR, September 6, 2003
The storm caused by our god, sex, sends us all to our ruin by the shortest route.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Lust
There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration).
ELLEN WILLIS
"Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life", Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade
Everyone is having sex until they fall in love. When you fall in love, then it's making love.
GILBERT ARENAS
Esquire, April 2010
Sex isn't everything. It's not even the most important thing. But when sex goes off the rails, there is probably a lot more wrong in the relationship than right.
JOHN MCELHENNEY
"As Goes the Sex So Goes the Marriage", The Good Men Project, August 26, 2017
From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much less about her functions as a wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marraige vow to turn something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field--sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct, sex.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays
The Bible is unfortunately unclear on a long list of moral and social questions and sex is one of them. On the one hand, there are expressions of admiration for the reportedly virgin mother of Jesus, but other portions of scripture speak quite accommodatingly of polygamy.
STEVE ALLEN
Vulgarians at the Gate
Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
All the governments, judges, gods.
WALT WHITMAN
"A Woman Waits for Me"
It is essential that we realize once and for all that man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature. The former is inherent, the other is grafted on.
EMMA GOLDMAN
lecture, "The Social Importance of the Modern School", Red Emma Speaks
Individuals having sex is like taking two raw eggs, which each is inclusive of their own yokes and egg whites, cracking the eggs, putting them in a bowl and thoroughly mixing them. This in itself forms a bond that cannot be untangled.
WILLIAM GARRETT DAVIS
The Christian's Guide to Mate Selection and Marital Preparation
Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.
DOROTHY PARKER
attributed, The Illustrated Dictionary of Snark
I felt an angel's possessing grip, the flames
rising from your skin,
the shadow of the divine.
EDWARD HIRSCH
O Magazine, February 2007
Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women's breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times?
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Because they like their own church, and the relationships within it, or because they love Jesus, or because they have a nostalgic affection for it, many people will go on giving the church their loyalty and commitment, while simply disregarding parts of its teaching they don't agree with. Sexuality is one huge area of church doctrine in which this is clearly the case. The traditional position on sexual intercourse is that it is not permissible in any circumstance except that of heterosexual monogamous lifelong marriage. But most Christians are not virgins when they marry. Many Christians divorce. Some Christians are practising homosexuals. Some live together outside of marriage. And though there is still a consensus in secular as well as church circles that adultery is a bad thing, a betrayal of relationship, it is the deceit and faithlessness that is seen as the sin, not the actual sex. In the Catholic church, teaching on contraception is disregarded by the majority. In no other area of church life is the gap between theory and practice so wide.
KATHY GALLOWAY
introduction, Dreaming of Eden
She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
The Sunday Philosophy Club
The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act.... Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.
WILHELM REICH
The Function of the Orgasm
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover