No subscription or hidden extras
Read through the most famous quotes by topic #sexualit
Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: 'try on' a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the 'fit' and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies' dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. 'Mariam,' he said as if by way of explanation, 'has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.' On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others. ↗
#autobiography #carol-blue #edward-said #georgetown-washington #heterosexuality
Weren't you wearing a purity ring when we got here? Aren't you supposed to be saving yourself?" Shanti asked. "Yeah," Mary Lou answered. "And then I thought, for what? You save leftovers. My sex is not a leftover, and it is not a Christmas present. ↗
The first time someone else touched me with the intent to pleasure, I fell in love. Not with that person, but with the act itself. Such intimacy and accord. Even with the awkwardness of first time lovers there was a grace and purity, carnal and beautiful that I knew from that moment on I could never live without. ↗
Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit. ↗
I take a nap after supper and dream of the U.S. Navy, a ship anchored near a war scene, at an island, but everything is drowsy as two sailors go up the trail with fishing poles and a dog between them to go make love quietly in the hills: the captain and everybody know they're queer and rather than being infuriated however they're all drowsily enchanted by such gentle love... (p. 119) ↗
I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are... seductive. And I like words because they can contain... fantasies. ↗
If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality? ↗
#homosexuality #sex #sexual-orientation #sexuality #equality
The modern mind is like the eye of a man who is too tired to see the difference between blue and green. It fails in the quality that is truly called distinction; and,being incapable of distinction, it falls back on generalisation. The man, instead of having the sense to say he is tired, says he is emancipated and enlightened and liberal and universal.... ...we find it less trouble to let in a jungle of generalisations than to keep watch upon a logical frontier. But this shapeless assimilation is not only found in accepting things in the lump; it is also found in condemning them in the lump. When the same modern mind does begin to be intolerant, it is just as universally intolerant as it was universally tolerant. It sends things in batches to the gallows just as it admitted them in mobs to the sanctuary. It cannot limit its limitations any more than its license....There are...lunatics now having power to lay down the law, who have somehow got it into their heads that any artistic representation of anything wicked must be forbidden as encouraging wickedness. This would obviously be a veto on any tragedy and practically on any tale. But a moment's thought...would show them that this is simply an illogical generalisation from the particular problem of sex. All dignified civilisations conceal sexual things, for the perfectly sensible reason that their mere exhibition does affect the passions. But seeing another man forge a cheque does not make me want to forge a cheque. Seeing the tools for burgling a safe does not arouse an appetite for being a burglar. But the intelligence in question cannot stop itself from stopping anything. It is automatically autocratic; and its very prohibition proceeds in a sort of absence of mind. Indeed, that is the most exact word for it; it is emphatically absence of mind. For the mind exists to make those very distinctions and definitions which these people refuse. They refuse to draw the line anywhere; and drawing a line is the beginning of all philosophy, as it is the beginning of all art. They are the people who are content to say that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and are condemned to pass their lives in looking for eggs from the cock as well as the hen. ↗
