Eroticism Quotes & Sayings

Alma had grown as tall as a man by now, with broad shoulders ... This need not have necessarily precluded her from marriage. Some men liked a larger woman, who promised a stronger disposition, and Alma, it could be argued, had a handsome profile
at least from her left side. She certainly had a fine, friendly nature. Yet she was missing some invisible, essential ingredient, and so, despite all the frank eroticism that lay hidden within her body, her presence in a room did not kindle ideas of ardor in any man.
It did not help that Alma herself believed she was unlovely. She believed this only because she had been told it so many times, and in so many different ways. Most recently, the news of her homeliness had come straight from her father ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism. — Esther Perel

She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girliness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words 'time management' out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down the unchartered beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell. — Rebecca Wells

My hand was shaking as I accepted that perfect hand. I honestly felt that I had sold my soul the moment I felt his hand encircle mine. I was now utterly his; I felt it down to the very marrow of my bones. — Cristina Rayne

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy. — David Grossman

A girl wearing a red dress in a forest will be some strange vision of unexpected eroticism, but a girl wearing a red dress on a catwalk will be highly predictable. — Nicholas Pegg

The pleasures of sin exist. We cannot deny them. But we also dare not deny what follows in their wake: a voracious appetite, inflamed with eroticism, demanding more indulgence more often until a degenerative spiral captures the soul and drags us on a never ending descent into deeper patterns of immorality and illicit behaviour ... Lust goes beyond the sexual. Lust can show itself in a variety of forms: covetousness, gluttony, drunkeness, power hunger, or unbridled ambition, to name a few — Edwin Louis Cole

The beloved is already in our being, as thirst and "otherness." Being is eroticism. Inspiration is that strange
voice that takes man out of himself to be every thing that he is, everything that he desires; another body,
another being. Beyond, outside of me, in the green and gold thicket, among the tremulous branches,
sings the unknown. It calls to me. — Octavio Paz

I think one of the great joys of being a writer is you can transcend everything, even your own sex, what century you live in, and how you think. I found it quite natural to think as a male because I actually think that as a female, one often thinks in the mind of a male in terms of eroticism. You think about what the other person feels. So it's not that hard to imagine being that person. — Rebecca Miller

Sitting on couch, lying legs apart
Dark dirty naked. Smiling at me,
Wicked lazy lusty eyes. I moaned,
When saw movement inside his silent,
The thick forest of pubic hair. — Delicious David

To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambiguous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning. — Milan Kundera

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry. — Anais Nin

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Eroticism challenges us to seek a different kind of resolution, to surrender to the unknown and ungraspable, and to breach the confines of the rational world. — Esther Perel

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air. — Esther Perel

Appalling numbers of youth have been led into a cynical ultra-sophisticated attitude which regards drinking as a badge of social aptitude, which makes a fetish of sport and professes eroticism as a way of life. A perverted and insane pictorial art, lewd exhibitionistic dancing and jungle music form the spiritual norm of this sector of America's youth. — Francis Parker Yockey

There is not enough celebration of companionship. Relationships aren't just about eroticism and sexuality. — Francesca Annis

Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity. — Germaine Greer

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners. — Florence King

He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures. — Anais Nin

What do you think,' she said. Her voice was rapid. 'You want to
marry me, don't you? Don't you think you want to marry me?' Waited for
the wisecrack. As she spoke she changed in some provocative way,
seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool
gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional
second. — Annie Proulx

The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors. — Karl Kraus

At five o'clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air. — Anais Nin

A harem is not a brothel, as so many Westerners erroneously believe. It is merely the women's living quarters. Male relatives can join them
but no male nonrelatives may do so. It is hardly a den of eroticism. — Phyllis Chesler

Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. — Esther Perel

You see how all occidental art loses by the fact that the magnificent expressions of love have been denied it. With us, eroticism is poor, stupid and frigid. It is always presented in ambiguous attitudes of sin, while here it preserves all its vital scope, all its passionate poetry and the stupendous pulse of all nature. But you are only a european lover ... a poor, timid, chilly little soul. — Octave Mirbeau

there is no pornography without a secrecy. — D.H. Lawrence

Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested
as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. He was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography. — Agatha Christie

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind. — Salvador Dali

Shiva becomes the destroyer, acquiring strength and inspiration from his consort Shakti, who is both Gauri, radiant goddess of eroticism, and Kali, dark goddess of extermination. — Devdutt Pattanaik

The things she could do with her mouth would blow any man off course. — Tiffany Reisz

But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel? — Milan Kundera

We fell into each other's arms and kissed like we were coming up for air after being underwater for days. The melding of our mouths was sweeter than oxygen. We took huge, deep gulps of each other as we struggled with worldly constraints like clothing and gravity, seeking to transcend it all in our coming together. — Emme Rollins

A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status
all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing). — J.G. Ballard

The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way. — George R R Martin

I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking. — Christopher Hitchens

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. — Milan Kundera

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much ... Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing. — Diane Ackerman

There are more models than the heterosexual one for a male and female who want to exchange erotic energy. — Carol Queen

Christianity gave eroticism its savor of sin and legend when it endowed the human female with a soul. — Simone De Beauvoir

This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay. — H.G.Wells

Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism. — Camille Paglia

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. — Walter Benjamin

Fantasies have to remain dirty. Cleanliness, scrupulousness and rationality are poison for eroticism. — Volkmar Sigusch

Yes, my dolls were the beginning. Obviously there was a convulsive flavor to them because they reflected my anxiety and unhappiness. To an extent they represented an attempt to reject the horrors of adult life as it was in favor of a return to the wonder of childhood, but the eroticism was all-important, they became an erotic liberation for me. — Hans Bellmer

In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other. — Milan Kundera

Eroticism bubbles beneath the surface of every vampire story, but Anne Rice is a writer to make the pot boil. — Janet Maslin

Eroticism is assenting to life even in death. — Georges Bataille

Eroticism. Though I doubt that they ever used this word, they embodied its mystical meaning as a quality of aliveness, a pathway to freedom — Esther Perel

Sex is like money; only too much is enough. — John Updike

How many rooms are there in the chambers of your heart? How many rooms full of memories can you describe like the one I'm going to tell you about. You know how you left him don't you? The man you were so in love with once. Bing Cherry Silk. Another man left those for you didn't he? And you put them on, just like I did. — Valentine Bonnaire

Sex is like an atom bomb. A potent weapon which fascinates and frightens. We're afraid to let it loose, yet we all have our finger on the button.
Zeena Schreck, Cuir Underground: Sado-Magic for Satan Interview, 1998 — Zeena Schreck

Jesse realized what he was doing. The man was trying to make her angry enough to give him what he wanted in the scene, mad enough to be completely submissive. "You want me to just lie there and like it? Just beg for it? gimme, gimme, come on, baby, fuck me, stick me, kill me, make me come, make me bleed, fuck me like there's no tomorrow, take it away from me, honey, fuck my mind, fuck me to death, fuck me dead! Is that what you want?"

Morrison looked at her, his smile actually growing, "that's a start. — Alice Alfonsi

Don't run around looking for someone who can sexually satisfy you, run around and look for the book which will intellectually satisfy you. — Michael Bassey Johnson

In America the chief accusation seems to be one of "Eroticism." This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty "amours," or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate? — D.H. Lawrence

Justus tried to make an objective assessment of Miguel. What was the big deal with him, anyway? So he was easy on the eyes. Actually that was an understatement; he was for female eyes, a virtual feast. He was a perfect physical specimen, and very sensual. He seemed to positively ooze sex and eroticism with his every move, look, and touch. Justus turned her head toward him to steal a glance at his profile, but he caught her looking at him.
His eyes were so arresting, they were a dark, fierce green, like beautiful shining emeralds. She also noticed flecks of gold laced through them, reminiscent of cat's eyes. Not any ordinary house cat, these were the eyes of a wild predator.
He was a panther; with his black hair and green eyes and the way he moved, so gracefully, yet with definite strength and agility. She sighed to herself, so much for her objectivity. — Amanda Bretz

American eroticism has always been of a different provenance and complexion than the European variety, an enjoyment both furtive and bland that is closer to a blushing cartoon than a sensual celebration. — Molly Haskell

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence. — Alain De Botton

Eroticism releases, ever so slightly, great lightning flashes that, on occasion, reveal to us the true nature of a given organ, suddenly restoring both its whole reality and its hallucinatory force, while simultaneously installing as sovereign goddess the abolition of hierarchies- those hierarchies within which we habitually grade, for better or for worse, the different parts of the body. — Michel Leiris

At Christmas, for example, when you see a big, brightly wrapped package under the tree with your name on it, you're interested. But it's not the wrapping paper you're looking forward to. It's the present inside. Lingerie works the same way. It's nice - but naked is always better.

Except for this.

This is the wet dream of every man born after 1975.

It's the elite of eroticism.

The ultimate fantasy.

Oh yeah - it's the Princess Leia bikini. — Emma Chase

Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death. — Georges Bataille

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry. — Georges Bataille

In other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention. — Catharine Arnold

In this loveless everyday life eroticism is a substitute for love. — Henri Lefebvre

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent. — Susan Sontag

Significantly, it was Disraeli who said, "What is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few" - perhaps the most profound insight into the very principle by which the slow and insidious decline of nineteenth-century society into the depth of mob and underworld morality took place. Since he knew this rule, he knew also that Jews would have no better chances anywhere than in circles which pretended to be exclusive and to discriminate against them; for inasmuch as these circles of the few, together with the multitude, thought of Jewishness as a crime, this "crime" could be transformed at any moment into an attractive "vice." Disraeli's display of eroticism, strangeness, mysteriousness, magic, and power drawn from secret sources, was aimed correctly at this disposition in society. — Hannah Arendt

People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals. — Catharine MacKinnon

Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death — Georges Bataille

I was very, very nervous about the naked scenes. I'm very shy and reserved. But it was Bertolucci and I have seen Last Tango. It's not pornographic. He's a master of eroticism. I stopped being self-conscious. You have to forget everything. — Eva Green

The woman who refuses to see her sexual organs as mere wood chips, designed to make the man's life more comfortable, is in danger of becoming a lesbian
an active, phallic woman, an intellectual virago with a fire of her own ... The lesbian body is a particularly pernicious and depraved version of the female body in general; it is susceptible to auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure and self-actualization. — Sigmund Freud

The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women's archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve. — Camille Paglia

I believe eros dwells in our innermost being as the spirit of creative expression. To me, eros is a great path that we must walk, a song we listen to, a game that we hunt and enjoy, a lesson to learn, a garden where flowers bloom, a prodigious puzzle to solve, a book to read, a chapter to write, and an ocean to swim in. That's what eros is to me. — Salil Jha

Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate. — Alain De Botton

I wish you would stop and seriously consider, as a broad and long-term feminist political strategy, the conversion of women to a woman-identified and woman-directed sexuality and eroticism, as a way of breaking the grip of men on women's minds and women's bodies, of removing women from the chronic attachment to the primary situations of sexual and physical violence that is rained upon women by men, and as a way of promoting women's firm and reliable bonding against oppression ... — Marilyn Frye

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.' - Senor Sempere. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Eroticism is the approval of life unto death. — Georges Bataille

Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept. — Camille Paglia

Living erotically is opening oneself up to nature
externally and within. — Kristie LeVangie

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself. — Adrienne Rich

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism. — Northrop Frye

The more hunger, the greater the desires, like those of men in prison, wild and haunting. So we had here a perfect world in which to grow the flower of eroticism. Of course, if you get too hungry, too continuously, you become a bum, a tramp. — Anais Nin

Two things are not debatable: eroticism, and comedy. If you don't think it's sexy, or funny, there's no way I can change your mind. — Gene Siskel

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself. — Georges Bataille

Pornography is certainly more beautiful than eroticism. Eroticism is ugly. Eroticism is an ideology... there is nothing more boring than eroticism, it's worse than poetry, even. I say three cheers for pornography. — Pierre Guyotat

Laughter is the lightning rod of play, the eroticism of conversation. — Eva Hoffman

What we will criticize 'modern' eroticism for is its lack of genuine sensuality, a sensuality which implies beauty or charm, passion or modesty, power over the object of desire, and fulfilment. — Henri Lefebvre

Most of the books of erotic poetry available today are either too old or are big anthologies covering the same poets and poems. There is a lack of new and original work. Most of us have read something from Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or from the Kama Sutra. But love is a theme that should be celebrated with freshness. — Salil Jha

We were a galaxy exploding into a million pieces, creating a whole new world, as we crashed against each other on the soft surface of his mattress, a cloud in the darkness, our bodies finally falling together like rain. — Emme Rollins

The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to it's surprises, varied expressions, and mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotion for it to attain its highest potency. — Anais Nin

Eroticism is, above all else, exclusively human: it is sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings. The first thing that distinguishes eroticism from sexuality is the infinite variety of forms in which it manifests itself. eroticism is invention, constant variation, sex is always the same.
In every erotic encounter there is an invisible and ever-active participant: imagination, desire.Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness.
Many years ago I wrote: love is a sacrifice without virtue. Today I would say: love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own: the freedom of the other. — Octavio Paz

Erotic attraction often serves as the catalyst for an intimate connection between two people, but it is not a sign of love. Exciting, pleasurable sex can take place between two people who do not even know each other. Yet the vast majority of males in our society are convinced that their erotic longing indicates who they should, and can, love. Led by their penis, seduced by erotic desire, they often end up in relationships with partners with whom they share no common interests of values. — Bell Hooks

Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety. What are we afraid of? Everything ... which includes sexual freedom and real female power. — Ariel Levy

He pressed a soft kiss down on the skin. I melted into a pool of desire, concealing it behind a demure smile. For such an innocent gesture, it overflowed with eroticism. My imagination was already running naked. I meant wild. My fully clothed imagination ran wild. — Sera Bright

I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along. — Lily King

When you succumb to obedience, in an erotic sense, you are not giving away a part of yourself, but seeking something new, something other, within yourself. — Chloe Thurlow

We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred. — Naomi Wolf

Sexuality, eroticism and desire are important for all of us. But that is also the contradiction. How can we speak about pictures and, for example, say no to this way of representing a woman's body? It's also a camera-and-object problem, of who is really guiding the camera. — Pipilotti Rist

In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband's fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried. — Germaine Greer

A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality. — Karl Kraus