David Leser > Quotes

“I thought about the opposite sex endlessly, and as I grew up, it became an almost all-consuming desire: resting my head against the soft fullness of a breast (pendulous or pert, it didn't matter), was an exquisite lullaby; being enfolded by a woman, entering a woman, was a thrilling voyage of discovery, as well as a homecoming to the warmest, safest place I'd ever been.”
― David Leser, Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing

“I thought about the opposite sex endlessly, and as I grew up, it became an almost all-consuming desire: resting my head against the soft fullness of a breast (pendulous or pert, it didn't matter), was an exquisite lullaby; being enfolded by a woman, entering a woman, was a thrilling voyage of discovery, as well as a homecoming to the warmest, safest place I'd ever been. In some ill-defined way, it was like possessing and transcending the world all at once, and it was enough to make you cry for the sheer joy of being human.”
― David Leser, Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing

“Maybe, in the unfathomable reaches of the male psyche, men have always been frightened of women - or at least frightened of the feminine qualities within themselves: those qualities that point inwards, to that place where our deepest feelings are lodged, but which centuries of masculine culture have repressed or removed.

Perhaps, this is the place where violence against women begins: in the shutting down of this inner world where relationships and connection truly reside, because the models we've been given for manhood fail to recognise a fundamental truth, which is that nothing meaningful in life ever happens without the ability to be vulnerable.”
― David Leser, Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing

“Everything we've ever assumed, the values and tastes we've acquired, the beliefs and standards we've adopted, the lens through which we've viewed the world ... so much of it manufactured by men, for men, about men.

Is it any surprise then, that the global 'forces of dark and furious energy' inside women have burst forth so spectacularly, particularly when the most powerful man in the world doesn't even bother to hide his vile and instinctive contempt for women?

Little wonder, too, the temptation for some women to direct their fury at all men, to lump them into one toxic bundle, rather than deconstruct the suffocating models of masculinity that have wrought this damage in the first place; models which, at their deepest level, have disconnected men from their hearts, stripped language of its full range of emotions, and prevented men from expressing their terror, grief or sadness, let alone allowed them to see women in all their humanity.”
― David Leser

“paraphrase Confucius, real knowledge is finding out the depths of one’s own ignorance.”
― David Leser, Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing

“To be human is often an endless tangle of invisible forces and confounding paradoxes, of being many things all at the same time.”
― David Leser, Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing