quotations about sex
You haven't got to be in love every time you go to bed.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter. Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought, had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours makes of man both an animal and a lover.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Seduction ... was both a science and art -- a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
DAN SIMMONS
Ilium
The thing is, most of the time when you're coming pretty close to doing it with a girl -- a girl that isn't a prostitute or anything, I mean -- she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don't. I can't help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they're just scared as hell, or whether they're just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame'll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping.
J. D. SALINGER
The Catcher in the Rye
Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do -- like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
MARTIN AMIS
interview, Washington Post, November 7, 2003
Sex expression is as vital a factor in human life as food and air.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Living My Life
Sex is natural, sex is good
Not everybody does it, but everybody should
Sex is natural, sex is fun
Sex is best when it's one on one
GEORGE MICHAEL
"I Want Your Sex"
What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
Last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.
WOODY ALLEN
Crimes and Misdemeanors
For wisest ends this universal Power
Gave appetites, from whose quick impulse life
Subsists, by which we only live, all life
Insipid else, unactive, unenjoy'd.
Hence to this peopled earth, which, that extinct,
That flame for propagation, soon would roll
A lifeless mass, and vainly cumber heaven.
JOHN ARMSTRONG
"The Oeconomy Of Love"
Yet this desire will never find full satisfaction outside the God-designed safeguards of entering into the commitment and covenant of marriage and approaching sex as the route to oneness, rather than orgasm. When we remove those safeguards, having sex is like taking the hard drive out of a computer, laying it on a table, and expecting the hard drive to accomplish the role it was created for. By itself, it won'd do you any good.
TIM ALAN GARDNER
The Naked Soul
I'm not saying sex is our divinity. Please. Only that sex is the one secret we have that approximates an exalted state and that we share, two people share wordlessly more or less and equally more or less, and this makes it powerful and mysterious and worth sheltering.... Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it's the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that's equal to others or better, even, that you don't have to go to college six years to get. And it's not religion and it's not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
"Sex" is a great, rich, complicated word. Metaphorically, it is a descriptive adjective that defines who we are; a noun that describes an endless array of people, places, and things; and a verb that conjures up activities that people all over the world find pleasurable. More than a word, it is a topic sentence for dissent and political posturing. It is a plot for complicated stories of interaction and intrigue, sometimes in our own families. It is a hypothesis for experimentation and curiosity. It is the grist of advertising copywriters, poets, and novelists. We desire sex, we deplore it, we regret it, or we do it, but whatever our stance, it remains on our minds.
SUSAN LIEBERMAN
Venus in Blue Jeans
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
The original sexual revolution was a tour de force, a huge success that came from what at first glance looks like a bad idea. Why bad? Because it risked losing valuable information. A successful bacterium, reproducing asexually, passes on its exact genetic makeup (absent the occasional mutation) to its offspring. But if an organism reproduces sexually, its genes are scrambled with those of its mate in order to produce the offspring's genes, a process called recombination. Because each half of this offspring's genes came from a different parent, and because of the scrambling process, no matter how successful either parent's unique combination of genes, the offspring's genome will not be the same as that parent's. Sexual reproduction has never passed on a full winning combination intact. Sex messes with success.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe
Sexual union is a holy moment in which a part of Heaven flows into the Earth.
JAMES REDFIELD
The Celestine Prophecy
As a person, therefore, would have no enjoyment of drinking, if he had not previously known thirst, so he who is unacquainted with the longings of love has no experience of the most ravishing pleasures.
XENOPHON
Hiero
Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful, provided you can get between the right man and the right woman.
WOODY ALLEN
attributed, The Seven Deadly Sins: A Companion
The necessity of perpetuating the species, forms the combining principle between males and females; a principle independent of choice or design, and alike incident to animals and to plants, which are all naturally impelled to propagate their respective kinds.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Each night ought to have its menu.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage