Quotes from Toni Bentley

To live and to laugh require a reason. But dancing is so close to one's guts that it has no reason and yet it needs none; it's physical, and as a source of good cheer it is end endless.

Dancing may not be the perfect substitute for love, human love, but it certainly requires all the time and thought and energy that could otherwise be dedicated to love.

A toe shoe is as eccentric as the ballerina who wears it: their marriage is a commitment.

If a man can possess a woman sexually -really possess- he won't need to control her ideas, her opinions, her clothes, her friends, even her other lovers.

If a man can possess a woman sexually -really possess- he won't need to control her ideas, her opinions, her clothes, her friends, even her other lovers.

A man must have confidence in himself and his cock, to fuck a woman in the ass. If he does not have this control, his cock will direct the action; he will move too quickly, hurt the once-willing woman, and rarely, rightly, will he be given a second chance.

It's my hurt, my pain, and who are you to take it from me? I don't need rescuing, I don't need pity, I don't need opinions, I need fucking--and maybe a little spanking for indulging my anger.

Women are taught that size doesn't matter, that it's the motion in the ocean. But this is a theory propagated by those bright guys with insecurities who need big theories.

Bliss, I learned from being sodomized, is an experience of eternity in a moment of real time.

Afterwards Isabelle often wondered if the moments themselves were greater or the memory of them. At least the memory did not pass, while the moments passed all too fast. Life whizzed by; she no longer had time to recollect it. Her notebooks to this day retain the story of her desperate attempt to hold together her self, her mind, her reason, her order, her morals.

The publisher has, helpfully, categorized this book under "self-improvement" in the time-honored American "self-help" tradition. These books, as Dr. Phil knows best, endlessly sell because they never work . . . but maybe the sequel will. There is, I surmise, a kind of insidious intimacy in these books, as on Freud's couch, between author and reader, an unspoken collusion in knowing much will be said but nothing will be done.

The unexpected but dependable law that functions in most artistic endeavors: namely that the pursuit of excellence has an even stronger instinctual draw than the need for emotional self-preservation.