I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not resolvable and were desti...
Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.
Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure.
Heterosexuality is the traditional way of expressing love and romance; the act of enjoyment between opposite sexes. It is not only for the purpose of enjoyment and pleasure, but also the human general survival. Whilst homosexuality is the freedom of ...
The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.
Good actors, including political actors, do not deal in unrealities. Rather, they create realities that matter – perceptions, aspirations, allegiances.
I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart.
When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.
Grace is not simply leniency when we have sinned. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.
I recall hearing one of my professors in seminary say that one of the best tests of a person's theology was the effect it has on one's prayers.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
It is a subliminal thing. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
After all, hadn't she been the one to pursue him? And Madame Dupuy had done it with a vigor that most women would have been too ashamed to display.
Making love is not something you do to someone―it's something you share. Lovemaking between men and women should be mutually pleasurably. Both women and men should be fully and completely satisfied.
The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else...
I don't believe in the term 'guilty pleasure,' because it implies I should feel ashamed for liking something. A real guilty pleasure would be, I don't know, taking gratification in some stranger's ghastly death or something - which I guess I do enjoy...
I'm always going to be making costumes. It's one of the ways I relax my brain. In addition to the pleasure of having the piece, there is a deep and abiding pleasure for me assembling something in my head - learning to know something in its totality i...
We understand and recognize what is good, but we do not labor to bring it to fulfillment, some of us out of laziness, some because we put something else, some pleasure, before virtue--and there are many pleasures in life, long conversations and indol...
