Intimacy Quotes - page 5

I don't have any fear of intimacy, but rather thrive on it, which is rare in a public person. (Jack Nicholson)
for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge. View quote
Virginia Woolf
Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them? View quote
Virginia Woolf
Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy. View quote
Plutarch
Courtesy is a science of the highest importance. It is, like grace and beauty in the body, which charm at first sight, and lead on to further intimacy and friendship, opening a door that we may derive instruction from the example of others, and at the same time enabling us to benefit them by our example, if there be anything in our character worthy of imitation. View quote
Michel de Montaigne
Those who were best able to provide themselves with the means of security against their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee, passed the most agreeable life in each other's society; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that, if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy. (40) View quote
Epicurus
When real intimacy occurs, any where, any how, it comes close to feeling we live forever, and we are not alone. View quote
Vanna Bonta
Unfamiliar environments heighten adrenalin, which might work for stimulating excitement or against totally relaxing into any kind of intimacy. View quote
Vanna Bonta
Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away. View quote
Eric Berne
There's been a revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past thirty years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication - of animals and ourselves - was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, gender equality, and health. View quote
John Zerzan
...in his case it went further and became indifference to social distinction. Never once in forty years of intimacy did his son notice in him a trace of snobbishness. He was one of the exceedingly small number of Americans to whom an English duke or duchess seemed to be indifferent, and royalty itself nothing more than a slightly inconvenient presence. This was, it is true, rather the tone of English society in his time, but Americans were largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams had every possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity or self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a gesture of pride! (Henry Adams)
(On H.P.B. (H.P. Blavatsky))And we, who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. View quote
Annie Besant
In the intimacy of the One, Those souls are pure and inwardly naked, without images, without figures, As if liberated from time, uncreated, Freed from their limits in silent latitude. View quote
Hadewijch
Perhaps my problem in marriage-and it is the problem of many women-was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage. View quote
Hedy Lamarr
When I attained a certain advanced intimacy with a man, and I don't just mean sex, I married him. View quote
Hedy Lamarr
There's no better place to hide from intimacy than in a relationship. View quote
Neil Strauss
When two people respect each other, the ability to be vulnerable and to reveal hurt feelings can create a powerful emotional connection that is the source of real intimacy and friendship. View quote
David D. Burns
Our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters. View quote
Ford Madox Ford
In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists. View quote
Havelock Ellis
But I do think we need to explore the commitment problem, which has caused many women to mistakenly conclude that men, as a group, have the emotional maturity of hamsters. This is not the case. A hamster is MUCH more capable of making a lasting commitment to a woman, especially if she gives it those little food pellets. Whereas a guy, in a relationship, will consume the pellets of companionship, and he will run on the exercise wheel of lust; but as soon as he senses that the door of commitment is about to close and trap him in the wire cage of true intimacy, he'll squirm out, scamper across the kitchen floor of uncertainty and hide under the refrigerator of Non-Readiness. View quote
Dave Barry
I think that the loss of the house call has been the biggest blow to the art of medicine in this century. Not only has the patient lost this precious attention, but the physician has not found a replacement for the lost intimacy. (Patch Adams)
Yes, sex may be at least in part inflected by politics, our fantasies may be at least in part a compendium of cultural myths, but the ways in which sex and fantasy ripen within the individual seem to me to vary so greatly that summaries become useless, even dangerous.But if I were to venture my own generalizations, I would say that with the collapse of other social values (those of religion, patriotism, the family and so on), sex has been forced to take up the slack, to become our sole mode of transcendence and our only touchstone of authenticity. The cry for scorching, multiple orgasms, the drive toward impeccable and virtuoso performance, the belief that only in complete sexual compatibility lies true intimacy, the insistence that sex is the only mode for experiencing thrills, for achieving love, for assessing and demonstrating personal worth - all these projects are absurd. View quote
Edmund White
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing. View quote
Edmund White
Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language. View quote
Richard Rodriguez
How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that to an adolescent was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves? View quote
Muriel Rukeyser