“From the outset the Buddhist tradition has been divided between the most uncompromising moral rigorism and a subversion of all ideals in the name of a higher truth, transcending good and evil. Māhāyana Buddhism, in particular, argued that the ultimate truth can be discovered only by those who awaken to the reality of desire and are able to transmute it.”
Source: The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality
“Yes, I thought, this is what I wanted, this is what I had truly imagined; to be desirable, to be beautiful and seductive, and at the same time to be completely powerful, in control, able to give glimpses of myself to strangers that would haunt them for a long time afterwards, when I wanted, when I chose, and to conceal myself or cut those glimpses short equally as I chose.”
Source: The Erotic Notebooks
“A winter storm. dramatic weather of any season often precipitates intimacy: two startled bodies seeking shelter in each other. On her livingroom couch Mrs. Moreno's bunched kimono rises & falls like a silken sea above her drowning Hispanic student.”
Source: Thirteen: Stories
“Being friends with your master doesn't stop your slavery, it stops your desire to be free.”
“I make people see what they desire and fear. Those two things might seem like contradictory concepts, but they’re actually closely intertwined.”
Source: (Self-Proclaimed) Menace To Society
“Fantasies when they are lived out, are sometimes dangerous things.”
I thought for a moment and shrugged.
“It can be just as dangerous not to live them out,” I said. “They torment you, haunt you, obsess you.”
Source: The Erotic Notebooks
“I've been looked at in pity and in fear and I've learned that the only way to really be seen is through desire. To be looked at and found whole. Found alive.”
Source: Cursed Bread
“Clients come to acknowledge that their desire was never to be perfect; it was only to be loved. To simply be seen, accepted, and embraced without conditions is what the child, who is now an adult, has been obsessed with-not perfect.”
Source: The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power
“What people really seek, even if they project it sometimes onto outer objects, is the feeling of being alive.”
Source: Individuation in Fairy Tales
“For Heaven's justice goads them on, that fear is turned into desire. Hence ne'er hath past Good spirit.”
Source: Dante's Inferno