sex

His dominance is not that of one chosen as best fitted torule†but it issovereignty basedontheaccidentofsex.

—Gilman and Charlotte Perkins Stetson

I am becoming like the Irish Census, broken down by Age, Sex, and Religion.

—MacRe¤  amoinn, Sean Seamas Criostoir

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

—Barnes,Julian Patrick

   For Spirits when they please Can either sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their essence pure, Not tied or manacled with joint or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, Can execute their airy purposes, And works of love or enmity fulfil.

—Milton,John

   Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and, disregarding the arbitrary economy of nature, one writer has declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears, whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.

—Wollstonecraft, Mary also known as Mrs Godwin

Far from being half a woman, a widow is the only complete example of her sex.Infact, thefinished article.

—Russell,John

The human desire for food and sex is relatively equal. If there are armed rapes why should there not be armed hot dog thefts?

—Toole,John Kennedy

   A few professional alienists understood his importance, but to most of the public he appeared as some kind of German sexologist, an exponent of free love who used big words to talk about dirty things. At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and seehisideas beginto destroysex in America forever.

—Doctorow, E(dgar) L(awrence)

La seule diffe¤  rence incontestable n'est pas celle des sexes ou des a"  ges ou des forces, mais celle des vifs et des morts. The only incontestable difference isnot that of sexorage or strength, but that of the living and the dead.

—Cixous, He¤  le'  ne

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name.In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

—Doyle, SirArthur Conan

Though both Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed; For contemplation he and valour formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace, He for God only, she for God in him.

—Milton,John

Everybody lies about sex. People lie during sex. If it weren't for lies, there'd be no sex.

—Seinfeld,Jerry

   Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.

—Berger,John Peter

Now,Watson, the fair sex is your department.

—Doyle, SirArthur Conan

The Gulf War was like teenage sex.We got in too soon and we got out too soon.

—Harkin,Tom (Thomas)

A king is always a kingöand a woman always a woman; his authorityand her sex, ever stand between them and rational converse.

—Wollstonecraft, Mary also known as Mrs Godwin

If God had meant us to have group sex, I guess he'd have given us all more organs.

—Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley

   My mother used to say, Delia, if S-E-X ever rears its ugly head, close your eyes before you see the rest of it.

—Ayckbourn, SirAlan

In the sex war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

—Connolly, Cyril Vernon

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

—Sontag, Susan

Literature ismostlyabout having sex and not muchabout having children. Life is the other way round.

—Lodge, David John

   For certain people, after fifty, litigation takes the place of sex.

—Vidal, Gore originally Eugene Luther Vidal,Jr

The power of money is a distinctly male power. Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice. In the hands of women, money stays literal, count it out, it buys what it is worth or less. In the hands of men, money buys women, sex, status, dignity, esteem, recognition, loyalty, all manner of possibility.

—Dworkin, Andrea

Money, itturnedout, was exactly likesex, youthought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.

—Baldwin,James Arthur

For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one cannever see foroneself.It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sexöto describe that spot.

—Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia ne¤  e Stephen

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from another.

—Thurber,James Grover

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.

—Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks Which practically conceal its sex. I think it clever of the turtle In such a fix to be so fertile.

—Nash, (Frederic) Ogden

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope isgone.

—Austen,Jane

Thus our twin souls in one shall grow, And teach the world new love, Redeem the age and sex, and show A flame fate dares not move: And courting death to be our friend, Our lives, together too, shall end.

—Philips, Katherine ne¤  e Fowler

My life was a strange one that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteemöit was my time, my belle e¤  poqueö but allthewhilewith a faintflickerofcalamity, likeflames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye.

—Hollinghurst, Alan

A romantic interest in our own sex, not necessarily carried as far as physical experiments, was the intellectual fashion.

—Connolly, Cyril Vernon

There's almost as many different sorts of marriage as there's different sorts of people. There's the young things that marry for love, not knowing what they're doing, and the old things that marry for moneyand comfort and companionship. There's the people that marry for children. There's the people that don't intend to have children and that aren't fit to have them. There's the peoplethat marry becausethey're so much run after by the other sex that they have to put a stop to it somehow. There's the people that want to trya new experience, and the people that want to have done with experiences.

—Shaw, George Bernard

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.

—Jong, Erica ne¤  e Mann

Sex and obscenityare not synonymous.

—Brennan,WilliamJ(oseph),Jr

Sex had never before asserted itself in her so strongly, for in former days she had perhaps been too impersonally human to be distinctively feminine.

—Hardy,Thomas

Sex is something I really don't understand too hot.You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away.

—Salinger,J(erome) D(avid)

Sex is engaging in the first rounds but what sustains interest in the long run is power.

—Jiang Qing or  Chiang Ch'ing

Most women know that sex isgood for headaches.

—Wilbur, Richard

In Slaka, sex is just politics with the clothes off.

—Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

—Updike,John Hoyer

He thought what a pity it was that all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened that really deserved a face, 14 he'd none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face.

—Amis, Sir Kingsley

Sex 'n'drugs 'n'rock 'n'roll.

—Dury, Ian

it's a sex object if you're pretty and no love or love and no sex if you're fat

—Giovanni,Nikki in full Yolande CorneliaGiovanni,Jr

Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear.

—Allingham, Margery Louise

Erotic practices have become diversified. Sex used to be a single-crop farming, like cotton or wheat; now people raise all kinds of things.

—Bellow, Saul

Sex suppressed will go berserk, But it keeps us all alive. It's a wonderful change from wives and work And it ends at half past five.

—Ewart, Gavin Buchanan

I thought of my mother, who would publicly campaign for birth control but would never even think she needed to talk to me, so firmly was she convinced that sex was something no womanöno intelligent womanöwould ever submit to unless she had to.

—Munro, Alice ne¤  e Laidlaw

Sex! What is that but life, after all? We're all of us selling sex, because we're all selling life.

—Chereskin, Alvin

Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love.

—Allen,Woody pseudonym of  Allen Stewart Konigsberg

'Cause some make forfeit of their name, And slave themselves to man's desire; Shall the sex free From guilt, damn'd to the bondage be?

—Habington,William

She gave him sex and he gave her class.

—Hepburn, Katharine

The soft, unhappy sex.

—Behan, Brendan Francis

   In the Garden City Cafe¤   with its murals on the wall Before a talk on'Sex and Civics' I meditated on the Fall.

—Betjeman, SirJohn

Women, even though they are almost too visible as sex objects in this country, are invisible people.

—Friedan, Betty (Elizabeth) Naomi ne¤  e  Goldstein

The weaker sex, to piety more prone.

—Alexander, Sir William

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

—Hughes, Robert Studley Forrest

But Jesus, when you don't have any money the problem is food.When you have money, it's sex.When you have both it's health, you worryabout getting ruptured or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death.

—Donleavy,J(ames) P(atrick)

It takes two to make a woman into a sex object.

—Morgan, Elaine

Women complain about sex more often than men. Their gripes fall into two major categories: (1) Not enough. (2) Too much.

—Lance, Bert

   I will endeavour to put the word sex in capital letters on the cover of every issue of the Literary Review under my editorship, regardless of its actual contents† My purpose is simply to embolden booksellers.

—Waugh, Auberon Alexander