#pleasure

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing. ↗

— Sydney Smith

#enjoyment #novels #pleasure #writing #love

It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them. ↗

— Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

#love #pleasure #love

Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain. ↗

— T.C. Boyle

#friend-of-the-earth #love #pain #pleasure #ty

The kiss intimately relates to the most primitive kind of human contact, which can satisfy all of our needs, like: feeding, enjoying pleasure, tasting, wanting, rejecting, everything we associate with love. ↗

— Mabel Iam

#love #mabel-iam #pleasure #relationships #love

Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals. ↗

— Doreen Valiente

#love #pleasure #worship #love

I've wanted to feel pleasure to the point of insanity. They call it getting high, because it's wanting to know that higher level, that godlike level. You want to touch the heavens, you want to feel glory and euphoria, but the trick is it takes work. You can't buy it, you can't get it on a street corner, you can't steal it or inject it or shove it up your ass, you have to earn it. ↗

— Anthony Kiedis

#pleasure #drugs

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health. ↗

— George Saunders

#cruelty #dumb #fat #god #lazy

A cooperative spirit enjoys a better harvest. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#cooperation-and-attitude #enjoy #harvest #human #humanity

Longing, whether for a passion or person, is one of the most powerful, yet painful emotions there are. It can drive you to its source under the most extreme conditions, or it can cripple you from obtaining your dream. When it comes to the pull you feel, always go after it, if not, it'll eat you alive. ↗

— Jennifer Salaiz

#heart-ache #life #loneliness #longing #passion

She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounced it excellent, "You see, I know just how you like it." This tea had indeed seemed to Swann, just as it seemed to her; something precious, and love has such a need to find some justification for itself, some guarantee of duration, in pleasures which without it would have no existence and must cease with its passing. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#tea #love