It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
Sense and Sensibility // Jane Austen
So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover // D.H. Lawrence
You’re spending your life without renewing it.
You’ve got to be amused, properly healthily amused.
You’re spending your vitality without making any.
Can’t go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!
Lady Chatterley’s Lover // D.H. Lawrence
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers,
who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly,
all at once, before a word has been spoken.
Crime and Punishment // Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I would spend all that winter and spring meditating under the trees and finding out the truth of all things.
The Dharma Bums // Jack Kerouac
I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where? To this very moment…
Nausea // Jean-Paul Sartre
I just wanted to tell you that with all your faults I love you. I love or revere very few people. As for the rest, I’m ashamed of my immense indifference to them… But for those I love, nothing and no one, neither I nor certainly they themselves, can ever make me stop loving them.
The First Man // Albert Camus
How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm.
To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence:
I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.
// Sylvia Plath
I waited for you calmly, with infinite patience.
I waited for you hungrily, just short of desperate.
When you came I knew that desperate was unattractive.
I was calm, no one wants the kind of calm I was.
It tried your patience, it made you hungry for a man
who was hungry. I am that man, I said,
but I said it calmly. My body was an ache, a silence.
It could not affirm how long it had waited for you.
The Waiting // Stephen Dunn
girls
please give your
bodies and your
lives
to
the young men
who
deserve them
besides
there is
no way
I would welcome
the
intolerable
dull
senseless hell
you would bring
me
and
I wish you
luck
in bed
and
out
but not
in
mine
thank
you.
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense // Charles Bukowski
