Nayusha

“He remained strong and sure, his eye ever clear, his love for his work and his love for me as constant as the sun.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“[…] fantasy does not exist comfortably with reality. It has a natural tendency to realise itself: to remake the world in its own image. The harmless wanker with the video-machine can at any moment, turn into the desperate rapist with a gun. The 'reality principle' by which the normal sexual act is regulated is a principle of personal encounter, which enjoins us to respect the other person, and to respect, also, the sanctity of his body, as the tangible expression of another self. The world of fantasy obeys no such rule, and is governed by monstrous myths and illusions which are at war with the human world — the illusions, for example, that women wish to be raped, that children have only to be awakened in order to give and receive the intensest sexual pleasure, that violence is not an affront but an affirmation of a natural right. All such myths, nurtured in fantasy, threaten not merely the consciousness of the man who lives by them, but also the moral structure of his surrounding world. They render the world unsafe for self and other, and cause the subject to look on everyone, not as an end in himself, but as a possible means to his private pleasure. In his world, the sexual encounter has been 'fetishised', to use the apt Marxian term, and every other human reality has been poisoned by the sense of the expendability and replaceability of the other.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“Changed?” replied Drogo. “No, absolutely not.” “You’re just saying that because you don’t find me as attractive as before. Tell the truth!” Was it really Maria speaking? Wasn’t she teasing him? Drogo listened to her words, hardly believing what she said. From one moment to the next he hoped she would drop that elegant smile, that sweet manner, and burst out laughing. “Of course! I find you most unattractive,” Giovanni would have replied in the good old days as he slid an arm around her waist, and she would have pressed against him. But now? It would’ve been absurd, a joke in poor taste. “I don’t think that at all,” said Drogo. “You’re exactly the same, I swear.”
― Dino Buzzati, The Stronghold

“All the times he’d dreamed of seeing her again—it was happening now, but was utterly unlike anything he’d imagined. A feeling he could not describe, his mind blank, his heart dazed.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance