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Quote by Julian Barnes

“Sad sex is when you feel you’re losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is the way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.”

Quote by Julian Barnes

Book:The Only Story
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The Only Story

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Author

Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes, born on January 19, 1946, is a distinguished British writer. His works span across various genres including novels, essays, and criticism, known for their unique literary style and profound insights into human nature. more

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“There is only one victory in life and that is to attain inner bliss. One can have all the money, power, status, wealth and  possessions of the world, but still live in misery. The wise man will not waste a single moment. His whole life will be a concentrated effort to attain blissfulness. Unless you attain bliss, you will have to come back again and again to the body. You will have to be born again and again. You will have to go through the whole of life and death again. Life is like a school. If you fail, you will have to go back to the same school again. If you pass, there is no need to come back. Only a man who has become awakened never comes back to the world., Then he lives in eternity. He lives in a bodiless immortality. He becomes part of the whole. He becomes oceanic, vast. The body is a confinement, The body has limitations. And growing up includes the frustrations of life, diseases, illnesses and old age. And they go on until you die. The body is a confinement, which is why the whole effort of meditation is to give you an experience of bodilessness. It gives you the experience of going beyond the body. It gives you the feeling of your consciousness. To know your consciousness is to know the unbounded, the infinite and the immortal.”

LifeHappinessMoneyMeditationInfiniteImmortalityReincarnationIlness
Book:The Way of the Heart
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“How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here - there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses… singularities! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn't take… mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden… the edges of steel razors, always holding potent mystery… rose thorns that prick us by surprise… even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann, the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe expanded… In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky - just before the last firing-switch closes - watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, where the fuze is… Do all these points imply, like the Rocket's, an annihilation? What is that, detonating in the sky above the cathedral? beneath the edge of the razor, under the rose?”

WarSexMathematicsArchitecture
Book:Gravity’s Rainbow
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“Because we never finished what we started, because it never was allowed to reach a natural close, our ending felt unwritten. I imagined other endings and how they would have defined me, and because I couldn't explore such endings with her, my desire ran loose where it could. I responded to the desire of others, and I fell easily for those who responded to the desire in me. At times I felt worn thin, but it was exciting, and as I found out, rare to be a person who enjoyed both giving and receiving pleasure, who was interested in the erotic as an exchange. Some people couldn't see past the sex, some people fell fast and hard, and though I was generous with my body, I was careful and particular about women I shared my heart with, and that left me lonely.”

SexRelationshipsIntimacy
Book:Permission
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“I don’t even pretend to understand it all. I was president of the Luther League, the youth group of our church. I was a good kid and a bad kid at the same time. I was looking for a very nice girl but also a very bad girl. Do all young men have these conflicts? And, what about whores? Well, in my mind, prostitutes are bad girls. Matter of fact, they are professional bad girls. As I said earlier in this diary, you don’t make love to whores, you fuck them. There’s a difference. They don’t require love and courtship, all they want is my money. I go to the bedroom with them and do the deed with no affection. They take my money and leave. All my life I have been told that girls who have sex outside of marriage are bad girls... sluts. I’ve also been told by my dad, “Son, sex is the most beautiful expression of love in a marriage.” Although I can appreciate the difference, that being, sex is meant for marriage only; my psyche has some difficulty reconciling the two messages. Sexually active girls are bad but sexually active wives are good. I’m afraid that someday if and when I wed the Pollyanna I’m looking for and fulfill my husbandly duty with her, I’m going to feel like I’m turning a good girl into a bad girl. In other words, I change my wife into a slut. And here’s the weirdest part: if my wife becomes a slut, the good boy in me will reject the bad girl I created in her. My angel and devil will be in a clinch hold.”

SexDevilLustAdolescencePornographyHornyTeenage AngstWhoresSluts
Book:God, Bombs & Viet Nam: Based on the Diary of a 20-Year-Old Navy Enlisted Man in the Vietnam Air War - 1967
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