#pleasure

But I don't read or listen for pleasure. I have too much else to do. ↗

— Piers Anthony

#i #listen #much #pleasure #read

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. ↗

— David Attenborough

#amazement #beautiful #feel #important #must

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ↗

— Jane Austen

#half #one half #other #pleasures #understand

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#almighty #first #garden #god #god almighty

La imaginación es el aguijón de los placeres; en los de esta especie, lo regula todo, es el móvil de todo; ahora bien, ¿no se goza por ella? ¿No es de ella de la que proceden las voluptuosidades más excitantes? ↗

— Marquis de Sade

#pleasure #imagination

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#force-of-nature #marriage #matrimony #nature #pleasure

Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#pleasure #life

So sweet and delicious do I become, when I am in bed with a man who, I sense, loves and enjoys me, that the pleasure I bring excels all delight, so the knot of love, however tight it seemed before, is tied tighter still. ↗

— Veronica Franco

#erotic #pleasure #poetry #sex #love

Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#usa #love

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of a good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word "heady" is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.) ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#pleasures #reading #equality