top of page

"When a culture oppresses women, and all do to one degree or another, it isn't convenient to acknowledge that there are women who like submission in bed or who have fantasies about rape. Masochistic fantasies damage the case for equality, and even when they are seen as the result of a "sick society," the peculiarity of our sexual actions or fantasies is not easily untangled or explained away. The ground from which they spring is simply too muddy. Acts can be controlled, but not desire. Sexual feeling pops up, in spite of our politics."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Sexuality quotes

"I thought masturbating was embarassing. I didn't even know why. It just was. It was like having sex with yourself. Having sex with yourself was really weird. Autoeroticism."

"It still strikes me as strange that anyone could have any moral objection to someone else's sexuality. It's like telling someone else how to clean their house."

"Sexuality is a private matter; some believe that broadcasting it destroys the very things that make it sacred."

"When I date women now, I have learned to simply not care what they think about it. I'm the same person I always have been. Faithful. Dependable. Kind. Sweet. Funny. Awesome. And if they want to discount me because of something as insignificant and irrelevant as me experiencing attraction to men as well, then they don't get me in their lives. They don't deserve me."

"Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest."

"Sexuality poorly repressed unsettles some families; well repressed, it unsettles the whole world."

"There is no sexuality that is greater or lesser than another."

"The second orgasm has a biblical connotation."

"Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt


"It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many."


"Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose."


"It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant."


"The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams."


"The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends."


"I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real."


"I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully."


"There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition."


"We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self."
bottom of page