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Notes Toward A Theory Of Pornography

I don’t believe that pornography creates a problem (that is, it doesn’t create a need for sexual fantasy) but that it reflects a problem, or rather, for me, not a problem but simply a fact: that a part of man’s make-up, a part of his sexual being, is this fantasy element.

Sister Mary Appassionata Lectures The Eighth Grade Boys And Girls: Every Day Another Snake

Sunbeams

Man becomes great exactly in the degree to which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.

Mohandas Gandhi

A Different World

The Sexual Politics of Ursula Le Guin

There is much to admire in these novels beyond the brilliance of their central conceptions. Their style is vivid but simple, utterly unpretentious, with the kind of transparency that reveals ideas in all their clarity. I can’t remember when I have done reading that is so satisfactory on an emotional level — telling a story I want to hear — and also on an intellectual level, provoking hours of thought beyond what the books even dealt with.

Proximity

This is something Freud had no idea of, that where there is love, there is no lust connected to the sexual organ, the lust is for looking, the lust is for proximity, the lust is for touching of the hand, the skin, the lust is for the interchange of some cosmic, electrical energy — and it is done, it is accomplished simply by proximity, by the sharing and exchanging of warmth, by the touching of skin to skin, it is done by body warmth, as a child, when it wants to be loved, wants the body warmth of its mother, the skin contact.

How To Keep Love Alive

Learning the proper name for magic; laughing at each other’s faults; finding meaning daily, providing reasons for waking every dawn

Telling The Truth

An unannounced visit, a four-year-old makeup artist, a dead parrot

The Tall One

He rolls the flower cart down the sidewalk, and I watch him through the window. Six days a week he goes by with his cart of flowers. He comes by just before visiting hours and stays until all the visitors have gone into the hospital.

The Appassionata Poems

Washing Dishes

In group homes, in the creek, with passive-aggressive breakage