"I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty."
— Pablo Neruda

"The girl in the tight black dress was passing by us now, eyeing Wes and walking entirely too slowly. "Hi," she said, and he nodded at her but didn't reply. Knew it, I thought.
"Honestly," I said.
"What?"
"Come on. You have to admit, it's sort of ridiculous."
"What is?"
Now that I had to define it, I found myself struggling for the right words. "You know," I said, then figured Kristy had really summed it up best. "The sa-woon."
"The what?""
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"Dorian used to watch you like a starving man who wants meat. Now he looks at you like he wants seconds."
— Richelle Mead

"Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze."
— William Carlos Williams (The Farmer's Daughters: Collected Short Stories)

"...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened."
— Marguerite Duras (Blue Eyes, Black Hair)

"Now and then, an inch below the water's surface, the muscles of his stomach tightened involuntarily as he recalled another detail. A drop of water on her upper arm. Wet. An embroidered flower, a simple daisy, sewn between the cups of her bra. Her breasts wide apart and small. On her back, a mole half covered by a strap. When she climbed out of the pond a glimpse of the triangular darkness her knickers were supposed to conceal. Wet. He saw it, he made himself see it again. The way her pelvic bones stretched the material clear of the skin, the deep curve of her waist, her startling whiteness. When she reached for her skirt, a carelessly raised foot revealed a patch of soil on each pad of her sweetly diminished toes. Another mole the size of a farthing on her thigh and something purplish on her calf--a strawberry mark, a scar. Not blemishes. Adornments."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire"
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Dart)

"…he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed form the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.
"
— Stephen King

"Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors"
— Alejandra Pizarnik

"What is cheaper than lust or of less value than alchemy or aphrodisiacs?"
— Avram Davidson

"Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Razor's Edge)

"Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean .... I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom."
— Oscar Wilde (Salome)

"Auf den Stachel des Begehrens haben wir nur eine Antwort: fangen, einschließen, festhalten."
— J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country)

"Worte entfremden. Sprache ist kein Medium für Begehren. Begehren ist Hingerissensein, nicht Austausch. Nur dadurch, dass die Sprache das Begehrte entfremdet, beherrscht sie es."
— J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country)

"Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?"
— Remy de Gourmont (The Angels of Perversity)

"But instead I am a lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows and a queer accent, and a cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile. And neither is she the fragile child of a feminine novel. What drives me insane is the two-fold nature of this nymphet-- of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of adolescent maidservants in the Old Country (smelling of crushed daisies and sweat); and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels; and then again, all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God. And what is most singular is that she, this Lolita, my Lolita, has individualized the writer's ancient lust, so that above and over everything there is --Lolita (46-47)."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Gods, I wish the world was full of passive women.He thougt for a moment longer, then scowled. On second thoughts, what a nightmare that'd be. It's the job of a man to fan the spark into flames, not quench it..."
— Steven Erikson (Memories of Ice)

""You never did master a leer."

- Katharine Murray, Death on the Family Tree"
— Patricia Sprinkle

"For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand."
— Stephen KingBag of Bones

"As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness.

This threefold image of degradation intoxicated him and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance. Edward was excited!

As the directress said, 'And lead us not into temptation,' he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, 'Amen,' he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch."
— Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)

"LOVES
LOVE, LOVE
"
— MARK TWAN