Everything on earth [is] beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
—Anton Chekhov
I had to face the facts; I was pear-shaped. I was a bit depressed because I hate pears. Especially their shape.
—Charlotte Bingham
The body has its own way of knowing, a knowing that has little to do with logic, and much to do with truth; little to do with control, and much to do with acceptance; little to do with division and analysis, and much to do with union.
—Marilyn Sewell
I honor shit for saying: We go on.
—Maxine Kumin
It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have, it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
—D. H. Lawrence
If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.
—Walt Whitman
Passionate love is not peculiar to the human species, for it penetrates through all existing things — celestial, elemental, vegetable, and mineral.
—Avicenna
The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.
—Oscar Wilde
We have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.
—Audre Lorde
Fear has a smell, as love does.
—Margaret Atwood
We have so many words for states of mind, and so few for the states of the body.
—Jeanne Moreau
Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.
—Anna Quindlen in Every Last One
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
—Jacques Lacan
There's something to be said in favor of working in isolation in the real world.
—A.R. Ammons
Save a little money each month and at the end of the year you'll be surprised at how little you have.
—Ernest Haskins