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“On the street, cars hurtled toward their destinations in a symphony of sound. Trees lined the pavement in a powerful show of survival: here they stood in this urban landscape, long-limbed and capable. And green, so green, sunlight pierced through their leaves and marked the concrete with dappled grays. I made my way home to my family, one among a million travelers crossing the city’s great canvas in quick strokes. Everywhere there were colors by the thousands—tint upon tint, shade after shade—of everything the spectrum of beauty satisfied. Everywhere, there were signs of the renewal and restoration of life.”

Quote by Stephanie Dupal

Book:The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories
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The Kindness of Terrible People and Other Stories

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Stephanie Dupal

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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.”

ReligionSex
Book:Camere separate
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“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.”

ReligionSex
Book:Camere separate
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“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?”

LoveSexImaginative Exchange
Book:I Love Dick
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