Henry Le Nav

“Few, if any, of the world’s problems can be solved with a mere twenty minutes of attention, and yet here, in the complex sociopolitical landscape of the bedroom, we have an opportunity to create bilateral satisfaction. When put that way, in the context of sexual peace and equality, is twenty minutes of focused attention, applied appropriately, really too much to ask, especially if it can save your sex life?”
― Ian Kerner, She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman

“Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting. Such generosity of perception returned upon himself; as he lay with Janet, lost in praise, Harold felt as if a glowing tumor of eternal life were consuming the cells of his mortality.”
― John Updike, Couples

“The troubles people have during sex cause them to flounder about the bed after sex in various degrees of unrest. Many couples fail to discuss their immediate reactions to sexual dilemmas. While these need not be dissected immediately like a cadaver on the postcoital bed, they can be touched on delicately. In any case, it's well to discuss them sometime between one lovemaking experience and the next. What always amazes me is that major differences in the ways people like to make love may go unexpressed for years, even a lifetime.”
― Avodah K. Offit, Night Thoughts: Reflections of a Sex Therapist

“But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole