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Quote by Valentine Glass

“My mother was never comfortable with the idea I was a sexual being, even before I made explicit this sexuality involved being facedown between a woman's legs.”

Quote by Valentine Glass

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Jarring Sex

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Valentine Glass

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“Many a time he had caught himself saying: "I can't live without God, but I can live without religion." He may have abandoned the practice of religion which was part of his boyhood, and which taught him how to interpret the world, and his surroundings, and his feelings, but he did so because he would not reconcile his life and his mysticism. He did so because his quest for God was sexual as well as emotional. At the same time he saw religion being practised in a weak and mawkish way, in a way that was emasculated and enfeebled, lacking the fertile passion and the violent receptivity of femininity or the exuberance of virility. A religion without sex for people who are afraid of the passions and the power of love. An accommodating, bourgeois religion, that is more often than not hypocritical. At the same time, on the other hand, even in his silent prayers, he was aware of putting his entire sexuality on the line. This is why he read Hosea. Because in those pages there was not an exclusively mental or spiritual vision of the relationship between God and His people. Rather, there was a representation of bodies, a representation of prostitution and wantonness, of the frenzy of separation, of wrath and of paternal protection. As has always been the case since time immemorial between people who love one another.”

“At times he had prayed while he was making love. His eyes strayed over the naked object of his desire with a most chaste, even virginal, reverence. He was aware of the miracle of having beside him the beauty of creation, and the wonder of being able to gaze upon it in silence. The wonder of being able to touch it with the rapt tips of his fingers, just as his eyes could stroke mountains at sunset. There was not the remotest notion of possessing the other, or having dominion over him. He did not want to steal anything, claim anything, or take anything away. He wanted everything to stay intact as it was in a feeling of gratitude and fullness. Hours could pass by in these insightful moments in which the loved one's body became the universe, with its various constellations and its various worlds.”

“And then Chris went alone into her room and wrote a letter, thinking she would send it, about sex and love. She was all confused about wanting to have sex, sensing that at this point if she slept with Dick the whole thing would be over. THE—UNEXAMINED—LIFE—IS NOT—WORTH—LIVING flashed the titles of a Ken Kobland film against the backbeat of a carfuck 1950s song. “As soon as sex takes place, we fall,” she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James. Although she really wanted both. “Is there a way,” she wrote in closing, “to dignify sex, make it a as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?”

“يخيل لأحدنا أنه سوف يبلغ إكتفاءً تاماً إذا توافرت لديه بعض حاجات معينة: فهو يتصور مثلًا القصر الذهبي والحديقة الغنّاء، والزوجة الجميلة والسيارة الفارهة والرزق الموفر، فيعتقد أنه سيكون سعيدًا بذلك فلا يحتاج إلى شيء آخر سواه. إنه مخطئ. وهو يدركهم ذلك عندما يكون محرومًا من تلك الحاجات الرائقة، لكنه لا يكاد يظفر بها حتى يسأم منها ويأخذ بالتطلع إلى البذخ الباذخ أو الطلعة الباهرة، أو إلى معالي الوزارة والجاه العظيم.”