Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Philip Hensher

Quote by Philip Hensher

Work

The Emperor Waltz

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Philip Hensher
Philip Hensher

Philip Hensher, born on February 20, 1965, is a distinguished British novelist known for his unique literary style and profound insights into human nature. more

You May Also Like

“I was thinking that you're right about vaginas not being remotely related to flowers. They don't smell the same or feel the same, and they're not pretty in any way that would make you want to put them in a vase in your kitchen." ... "I'm not saying they can't be in the flower family, just that they can't be a lily or a daffodil. If they had to be a flower ... then they'd be an anomaly-type flower, the badass ones that eat flies." "Venus fly traps!" "Exactly”

“For St Paul and other Christian preachers, the body and its urges were not to be celebrated but smothered. In tortuous and embarrassed circumlocutions, Paul raged at ‘this body of death’. The rewards of a virgin in heaven were said to be sixty times greater. Christian writers in this period recorded the stirrings of their sexuality with great distaste – perhaps none more influentially than Augustine. Sex was, he felt, permissible if children resulted from the union but even then the action itself was lustful, evil and ‘bestial’, while erections were ‘unseemly’. The West would reap a bitter harvest of sexual shame from the disgusted writings of these two men. In the earliest days of the religion, some Christians went further, arguing that there was no need for sex any more at all. A new form of creation, in the form of a great conflagration and rebirth of the godly, was imminent. What need for awkward, messy, inexact human reproduction? Eternal life rendered reproduction redundant.”

“Joy is not always found in splendour — but in the ordinary. In the steam rising from a morning cup. In a shared laugh. In the quiet beauty that surrounds us, waiting to be noticed.”