Monday, May 23



"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others - the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would sleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated


“‘Oh’, he said. He was trying to smile, but it was a brave smile, a sickroom smile, and I was sorry I had caused it. I had apparently taken the wind out of his sails. His discouragement wasn’t a good sign. Men should stand up to me more than that. They have to fight back to satisfy me. They have to face me down.”
— Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love








“And I knew him better than he knew himself. He was such a pathological narcissist. Telling him what he was thinking was the equivalent of a blow job for him. He made me feel brilliant for understanding him, made me feel as if I were a genius.”
—Kate Christensen, The Great Man





“Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.” 
— Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza





The very act of sex has been deemed as somehow ‘belonging’ to men. Women are perceived as a means to an end that is entirely the mans own, and has nothing to do with the love and tenderness it was created to involve. Sex is about gratifying a man’s desires; about letting them take what is, apparently, rightfully theirs. Of course men did not invent the idea of women being objects of desire, women have enforced it by succumbing to the ideals that society throw at them. That does not transfer blame onto either gender; it simply means that we live in a society where sex serves as the main currency. What else do we expect from a generation where a man needs to do little more than buy a girl a drink in order to get her to sleep with him? Men literally do not know any better, regardless of the dent feminists and radicals have made in women's rights. What’s sadder is that neither do women. Not only do they not expect sexual fulfillment, but they do not even search for it. The amount of women who have never experienced an orgasm is ever-growing - sex is not about them, and they know it. Consequently they endeavor instead to please their partner as best they can, sacrificing their own desires, and indeed their dignity, in a pitiful attempt to gain some sort of respect in a world devoid of any. 





“There is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.”
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence


The truth is I’ve never fooled anyone; I’ve let people fool themselves. They didn’t bother to find out who and what I was. Instead, They would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them; They were obviously loving somebody i wasn’t. 
— Marilyn Monroe