Quotes by Journalists - Page 177

jinn . . . occupy bodies which are in a liminal state . . . when consciousness is a sheet of copper beaten down, mirroring only the moment
J.M. Ledgard
My generation was, in effect, the product of a social experiment. If we did not understand marital intimacy, it was because we had not seen it modelled. We lurched from relationship to relationship, dazzled by the newness of meaninglessness, relentless in our search for something even the most perceptive of us could not identify.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Strauss admits to being obsessed by his mother's rejection, and with the resultant rents in self-esteem. The Game echoes with disturbingly abusive comments leveled at his adolescent self, a self he feels was unacceptable. With bravado, he expresses regret that he didn’t rack up more sexual conquests in his teens; in person, he expresses a truer regret that he was intimidated by life itself.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Sometimes work was just what you clocked into while you were falling in love. Sometimes sex was just something you did while you weren't at work. Drugs were something you did sometimes when you couldn't deal with one of those things, or with yourself. The City was so expensive and so grueling sometimes that it was easy to be unsure why you were there. Many were there to make money, money that could largely only be made there, in the long spiny arms of industries that could never grow anywhere else or anywhere smaller. Some people just liked it, its loudness and crowdedness and surprises. Some started there for a reason and then couldn't imagine being anywhere else, but maybe lost track of that reason along the way. Some people had a plan. Some were just chancing it. Either way the months flew by, and over the years you came up with something or you came up with not much.
Choire Sicha
Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.
Cecil Brown
I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can't be done. I believe that's why sexual love, which needn't be, is so intensely intertwined with sin.
Mark Helprin
Coffee is a girl who never tells a boy no.
Andrew Smith
And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness. I wondered why they weren’t prouder of it. Of this magic. I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn’t just opt for one with a picture of sex.
Matt Haig
We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice. But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.
Gabriel García Márquez
Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love
Gabriel García Márquez
We men are the slaves of prejudice,' he had once said to her. 'But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.
Gabriel García Márquez
nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps perpetuate love
Gabriel García Márquez
The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love.
Gabriel García Márquez
There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way
George Orwell
Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is.
Tarun J. Tejpal
Because, in an empty bedroom with creaky old wood floors, it is a natural human response to just stand there and shift your weight from foot to foot, and think about sex.
Andrew Smith
I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don't really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman's bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise?
Albert Camus
A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except — very rarely, when he can raise a few shillings — a prostitute.It is obvious what the results of this must be: homosexuality, for instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than these there is the degradation worked in a man who knows that he is not even considered fit for marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as demoralizing as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage to a man’s self-respect.
George Orwell
Nigromanta took him to her room, which was lighted with false candlesticks, to her folding cot with the bedding stained from bad loves, and to her body of a wild dog, hardened and without a soul, which prepared itsself to dismiss him as if he were a frightened child, and suddenly it found a man whose tremendous power demanded a movement of seismic readjustment from her insides.
Gabriel García Márquez
Unlike a variety of other relationships,friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist.
Andrew Sullivan
Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face
Italo Calvino
He always thought a muse should be sex on legs.
Lauren Beukes
Sex and commerce are fine things, but man cannot live by Viagra and the Dow Jones alone. A life led collecting things and experiences in pursuit of happiness is not necessarily a bad life, but it’s not a good life either. Too often, the Democrats act like the Party of Lust, and the Republicans the Party of Greed. Both are deadly sins that eat at the soul.
Rod Dreher
Women’s imagination – unlike men’s, I would argue – does not always need the erotic equivalent of Semtex to ensure detonation.
India Knight
I am a massive slag!" I think to myself, in a motivational way. "I'm a Lady Sex Adventuress! I'm a Pirate of Privates! I'm a swashfuckler!" ... I think of "Teenage Whore" by Courtney Love as my personal anthem.
Caitlin Moran
Conversation is the sexiest foreplay, the perfect prelude to sex, the fiery banter that gets you heated, the stimulation of the mind that transmits to the body. Conversation is a give and take. Just like sex itself. And the best give and takes — the best conversations — lead to the best sex.
Zara Barrie
Sex is the glue of relationships, Caitlin, and it's what life is all about. It's the opposite of death, of giving up, of getting swamped by... What's out there. See it as symbolic.
Mark Chadbourn
The eyes and the sex understand and know every language without any distinction.
Ehsan Sehgal
Sometimes rebuffing him was a difficult, but this evening Margo whispered something about the prohibition on sex during the Yom Kippur holiday--as if they were a family of rabbis!--and he gave in and turned on his side. Rejected and repelled, he would fall into his nighttime sleep; in just a few moments she would hear that sound she hated, the heavy breathing that would rise to his nostrils and turn into a saw-like din, and Margo would wonder whether to shake him or let him be. If she awaken him, there was a chance he might start probing all over again; if she let him snore, he would disrupt her thinking, and she would not be able to give herself over to the brilliant idea she had come up with while staring in the mirror.
Anat Talshir
It's true that increasing one's number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul stomped on, and of having really bad sex. It also, I should add, increases the odds of finding someone with whom you have terrific sex, and learning more about what turns you on and what turns you off, how your body works and how other people's bodies work.
Rebecca Traister
I am afraid of sex as sex is defined by the dominant culture, as practiced all around me, and projected onto magazine pages, billboards, and movie screens. I am afraid of sex because I am afraid of domination, cruelty, violence, and death. I am afraid of sex because sex has hurt me and hurt lots of people I know, and because I have hurt others with sex in the past. I know that there are people out there who have been hurt by sex in ways that are beyond words, who have experienced a depth of pain that I will never fully understand. And I know there are people who are dead because of sex. Yes, I am afraid of sex. How could I not be?
Robert Jensen
Thus, one of the awful things I can admit about myself is that the two years I spent with Jennifer live in my mind mostly as a series of frantic, breathy memories. Clawing hands tugging off clothes, heartbeat thumping in my ears, fingernails digging down my back. salty tastes lingering in my mouth. It's biology. It's hormones. As time passes I can recall fewer and fewer of our conversations and I couldn't give you the details of our five most-fun dates (though I have a fairly graphic vision of how each of them ended).If upon hearing this you pump your fist and wink knowingly, you can kiss my ass. She was a good friend to me. She put up with my bullshit and at times not even I can put up with my bullshit. But all that is gone and what is left is a big, black hole where the sex used to be.
David Wong
Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.” The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous.
Peggy Orenstein
Josè Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her language.
Gabriel García Márquez
We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an impossible language for intimacy.
Cristina García
The Hollywooden heads would buy a car for almost any purpose except a worthy one. Many automobiles were purchased to attract members of LA's eight or ten opposite sexes. Since the denizens of America's Gomorrah, were incapable of verbalizing any idea more complex than "box office gross," the expensive car served as a substitute for witty come-on and seductive chat.
P.J. O'Rourke
The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).
Christopher Hitchens
He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.“‘How about my present?’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.“Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!“No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not this evening, I’m afraid.“All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by results.“He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table.’“Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail.
George Orwell
It was about as easy getting the Statue of Liberty to spread cunny, which did take some dynamite persuasion.
William T. Vollmann
She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well she found me in the mountains and she was raped - by me.
Ian Fleming
Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.
Karl Kraus
All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken.It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.
Ian Fleming
Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one's head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark−haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.
George Orwell
I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.
Christopher Hitchens
Having a relationship and not even a sexual one is so straight, it's practically perverted.
Sarra Manning
Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.
Nigel Slater
By 1975 sexual feeling and marriage will have nothing to do with each other.
John Langdon-Davies
It seemed to me, watching, that if you were dextrous enough to gift-wrap an independent-minded amphibian, you could just about manage a condom.
Naomi Wolf
We now had three girls and one testosterone-pumped guy bird that spent every walking minute doing of of three things: pursuing sex, having sex or crowing boastfully about the sex he had just scored. Jenny observed that roosters are what men would be if left to their own devices, with no social conventions to rein in their baser instincts, and I couldn't disagree. I had to admit, I kind of admired the lucky bastard.
John Grogan
When I was young and had no senseIn far-off MandalayI lost my heart to a Burmese girlAs lovely as the day.Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,her teeth were ivory;I said, "For twenty silver pieces,Maiden, sleep with me."She looked at me, so pure, so sad,The loveliest thing alive,And in her lisping, virgin voice,Stood out for twenty-five.
George Orwell
The only thing for it is to use men for sex and never let any of them get so close they could hurt you.
Dorothy Koomson
The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.
Heywood Broun
The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors:1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value;2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy;3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms.
Naomi Wolf
The clitoris not only applauds when a women flaunts her mastery; it will give a standing ovation. In the multiple orgasm, we see the finest evidence that our lady Klitoris helps those who help themselves. It may take many minutes to reach the first summit, but once there the lusty mountaineer finds wings awaiting her. She does noy need to scramble back to the ground before scaling the next peak, but can glide like a raptor on currents of joy.
Natalie Angier
Sex isn't good unless it means something. It doesn't necessarily need to mean "love" and it doesn't necessarily need to happen in a relationship, but it does need to mean intimacy and connection...There exists a very fine line between being sexually liberated and being sexually used.
Laura Sessions Stepp
You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.
Ernest Hemingway
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.
Hunter S. Thompson
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.
Barbara Ehrenreich
...once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.
Oliver Burkeman
Part of the problem with positive thinking, and many related approaches to happiness, is exactly this desire to reduce big questions to one-size-fits-all self-help tricks or ten point plans.
Oliver Burkeman