Quotes About Intimacy

we saw the edges of one another's souls.

When a man I like touches my arm or my hair, I want to know if he'll touch the center of me, and whatever I learned in school--I went to school for a long time--I seem to believe that my center can be reached best with the tip of a penis....

He leaned toward her, slowly raising his hand to his hat and then doffing it quickly, as if taken by surprise, when she leaned forward to meet him. And this, she thought, of course, was what the whole evening had been for, the delightful feel of his rough cheek against her fingertips, his hands and lips and warm breath. The lingering taste of coffee in his mouth. Something

Her husband closed the door on her, gently, with both hands, as if he were covering her with a blanket. He crossed in front of the car, his hair on end and the pale scalp at the back of his head exposed. He now looked every bit his age, she thought. As he grew older, it seemed to her that she was not losing sight of his younger self but coming to recognize instead another man altogether, one she was just beginning to find familiar. He

trimmed border of his hair. All that trying to be charming and trying to be demure and hoping to look attentive and to speak well and wondering how this strange impulse of his will come to a conclusion put aside now that they had agreed, finally, that this, after all, was simply what they'd wanted. The warmth of it, the moment's respite.

Her husband was asleep beside her. She could

As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?

He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.

She would lean her head against the back pillow of the sofa, thinking that she lay in his arms. You would not think that she'd remember his face but it would spring up in detail, the face of a creased and rather tired-looking, satirical, indoor sort of man. Nor was his body lacking, it was presented as reasonably worn but competent, and uniquely desirable.

Love is not for the undepilated.

I had once heard somebody say, at a party, that one of the nice things about marriage was that you could have real affairs – an affair before marriage could always turn out to be nothing but courtship.

They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.

hector him like this from now on, when I could get him alone.

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy

Men had fallen in love with Averill before. Twice she had promised to marry them, then had had to get out of it. She had slept with the ones she was engaged to, and with two or three others. Actually, four others. She had had one abortion. She was not frigid - she did not think so - but there was something about her participation in sex that was polite and appalled, and it was always a relief when they let go of her.

Sex meant nothing to him, or at any rate it did not mean what it meant (had meant) to her...

I had the feeling that if she could have moved all around me, been in front and behind and on both sides at once, that was what she would do. She would close me off, she would peer into me until she found whatever she wanted, and got it rearranged.

Nothing changes really about love.

How attractive, how delectable, the prospect of intimacy is, with the very person who will never grant it. I can still feel the pull of a man like that, of his promising and refusing. I would still like to know things. Never mind facts. Never mind theories, either.

We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.

our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup.

It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide.