"I use to be Snow White, but I drifted."
— Mae West

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

"I know this sounds incredibly lame,
but I don't want losing my virginity
to feel like I'm losing something.
I want it to feel like I'm finding something.
I want sex to be amazing.
I want it to be life-alteringly wonderful.
And I want it to happen with someone I love."
— Sonya Sones (One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies)

"Lady and gentleman, when my parents left Korea with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the considerable wealth they had amassed in the shipping business, they had a dream. They had a dream that one day amid the snowy hilltops of western North Carolina, their son would lose his virginity to a cheerleader in the woman's bathroom of a Waffle House just off the interstate. My parents have sacrificed so much for this dream! And that is why we must journey on, despite all trials and tribulations! Not for me and least of all for the poor cheerleader in question, but for my parents and indeed for all immigrants who came to his great nation in what they themselves could never have: CHEERLEADER SEX."
— John Green (Let It Snow: Three Holiday Stories)

"I love my virginity to the apocalypse."
— Scott Westerfeld

"It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge."
— Voltaire

"I’ve remained a virgin for you."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best."
— Jessica Valenti (The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women)

"FOr women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise."
— Jessica Valenti (The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women)

"Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat. "
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)