"When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better. "
— Mae West

"No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor. "
— Betty Friedan

"What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"I don't mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it's based on femininity. We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it, everything."
— Marilyn Monroe

"A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing."
— Marilyn Monroe

"A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity."
— Germaine Greer

"Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is."
— Barbara Bush

"The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad."
— Erica Jong

"I have found men who didn't know how to kiss. I've always found time to teach them."
— Mae West

"I was like, Am I gay? Am I straight? And I realized...I'm just slutty. Where's my parade?"
— Margaret Cho

"After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn’t say, "I fuck therefore I am"."
— Jeanette Winterson (Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd)

"I've had more difficulty accepting myself as bisexual than I ever did accepting that I was a lesbian. It felt traitorous. A few years ago, I admitted to myself that I was still interested in men in more than a "Brad Pitt is slick hot sexy" kind of way. But I worried whatmy friends, exes, and the Community would think. I never even broached the subject with my parents. Because what bothered me the most was that people would think that being a lesbian had been a phase for me, when that was so very not the case. What I feared was that I would no longer be part of a community, that I might be seen with my boyfriend and not be recognized as something not the same. "
— R. Gay (First Person Queer: Who We Are)

"Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy."
— Björk

"Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking."
— Derek Jarman

"A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded gun on your coffee table- There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about."
— Garrison Keillor

"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 (Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood)

"If sexuality is one dimension of our ability to live passionately in the world then in cutting off our sexual feelings we diminish our overall power to feel know and value deeply."
— Judith Plaskow (Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective)

"Little girls think it's necessary to put all their business on MySpace and Facebook, and I think it's a shame...I'm all about mystery."
— Stevie Nicks

"What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"We tend to treat labels as real, rather than as representations of reality"
— Dewight R. Middleton

"He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows."
— Don DeLillo (Mao II: A Novel)

"I've been called promiscuous. Not a pretty word, is it? Makes you think of the gloop that comes out of your nose or what comes up your throat when you're gagging, if you're trying to swallow down something you didn't necessarily mean to swallow. Promiscuous: your face has to pucker when you say it.

I prefer to think of myself as an adventurer. Charting the souls of so many of god's creatures, and of the floaty beings that populate the land of notions. It's a job. It's a calling. It takes strong thigh muscles, intelligence, cunning, a good pair of boots. It takes heart, in fact. The heart to stay on. To not be defeated."
— Sylvia Brownrigg (Ten Women Who Shook the World)

"If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be hand only if they persevere."
— P.D. James (The Children of Men)

"When we touch the place in our lives where sexuality and spirituality come together, we touch our wholeness and the fullness of our power, and at the same time our connection with a power larger than ourselves."
— Judith Plaskow (Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective)

"It is as though they simply cannot contemplate the notion of a short, slight man who dresses and moves like a popular (mis)conception of a homosexual being attractive to millions of women."
— Dave Hill (Prince a Pop Life P)

"This is a passion story: my passion, his, ours — yours."
— Elizabeth Cunningham (The Passion of Mary Magdalen: A Novel)

"The worst word in our language is 'masturbation' ...which means to abuse. Starhawk says, 'Throw it out.' Self-pleasure is the word...We can self-pleasure ourselves--you won't go blind, you might see a lot!"
— Matthew Fox (The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine)

"So I say, if you are burning, burn. If you can stand it, the shame will burn away and leave you shining, radiant, and righteously shameless"
— Elizabeth Cunningham

"Your only real choices are to open fully and receive their gifts or crucify them and be relieved of their force...But you must be willing to feel your heart's terrors and wounds or else you will close and protect yourself, striking back at the source of openness you most yearn to become..."
— David Deida

"I started to be really proud of the fact I was gay even though I wasn't"
— Kurt Cobain

"Read "The Story of O." Convince yourself that it was in fact written by a woman or someone who thinks like a woman."
— Whitney Otto (How to Make an American Quilt)

"Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. "
— Foucault Michel

"She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure."
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption)

"My bisexuality is part of the expression of the flexibility, the changeability of my spirit that feels essential and precious to the center of my life. My bisexuality is a part of my desire to remain an outsider, to be able to "pass" into polarized worlds, to abandon expectation, to honor the mystery of being. My bisexuality is a celebration of the ever-opening flesh, the expansive, fluid mirror of social discourse."
— Michelle T. Clinton

"[I]t is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls."
— Mary Roach

"I'm fairly fond of boys, but my preference is for girls; When I have enough of a girl, she serves me still as a boy."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's Roman Elegies and Venetian Epigrams)

"The lust of the flesh directs these desires [of personal union], however, to satisfaction of the body, often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons."
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła) (Blessed Are the Pure of Heart: Catechesis on the Sermon on the Mount and Writings of St. Paul)

"What freedom men and women could have, were not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster. "
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)