Carl Wilkinson

“Of the thousands who have paid homage to virtue, barely one has thought to inspect the pedestal on which it stands.”
― Frances Wright

“When enough is not enough, a Hedonist is born.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Open the Windows: To the World Around You

“The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.”
― Sergio De La Pava, A Naked Singularity

“There are lots of things sons shouldn’t imagine about their mothers, above all what it was like to become one.”
― Bauvard, The Prince Of Plungers