Quotes About Courtesans

Wealthy Venetian men provide little education for their daughters and keep their wives housebound - some don't get out more than two or three times a year. They have no friends, no recreations. Then the men wonder why their womenfolk are so dull. they patronize courtesans at least as much for entertainment as for sex, probably more.

As the political sky darkened, the court was lost in a last idyll of pleasure gardens, courtesans and mushairas , or poetic symposia, Sufi devotions and visits to pirs , as literary and religious ambition replaced the political variety.

The courtesans, as Vandeuvres used to say, avenged public morality by emptying his moneybags.

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

My mother named me Violet after a tiny flower she loved as a girl growing up in San Francisco, a city I have seen only in postcards. I grew to hate my name. The courtesans pronounced it like the Shanghainese word vyau-la—what you said when you wanted to get rid of something. "Vyau-la! Vyau-la!" greeted me everywhere

According to the greater or lesser violence of your sensual passion, you have perhaps discerned some of those twenty-two pleasures which in other times created in Greece twenty-two kinds of courtesans, devoted especially to these delicate branches of the same art.

Balzac loved courtesans. They were independent women, and in the 19th century, that was a breed that was just evolving.

By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.

fiction has served to propagate the notion that courtesans ply their trade in the area and that geiko spend the night with their customers. Once an idea like this is planted in the general culture it takes on a life of its own. I understand that there are some scholars of Japan in foreign countries who also believe these misconceptions to be true. But

Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.

In the mid-1800s, they were known also as 'singsong houses,' and the courtesans were actually master musicians.

The Blue Hose of Presbyterian College and the Ichabods of Washburn University are perhaps the most amusing nicknames in collegiate sports; Blue Hose refers to stockings, not to melancholy courtesans.

Take up something that you know will never bring you any returns except pleasure—in other words, allow yourself to live the way brilliant eighteenth century courtesans lived. Don't be afraid of having a decorative life, even if all the decorations come from you.