That's precisely what's so extraordinary about you, you enjoy giving pleasure. Offering your body as an object of pleasure, giving pleasure unselfishly: that's what Westerners don't know how to do any more. They've completely lost the sense of giving. Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren't up to porn standards, but for the same reasons they no longer feel truly attracted to the body of the other. It's impossible to make love without a certain abandon, without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness. Sentimental adulation and sexual obsession have the same roots, both proceed from some degree of selflessness; it's not a domain in which you can find fulfilment without losing yourself. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that we're obsessed with health and hygiene: these are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love. Michel Houellebecq
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence – either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of... - Aldous Huxley

  2. If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity. - Haruki Murakami

  3. If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen. - Dashiell Hammett

  4. I really think that writing about sex is writing about the mind. - Jane DeLynn

  5. He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

More Quotes By Michel Houellebecq
  1. The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

  2. Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.

  3. An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would...

  4. Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

  5. People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things — even tragedy — with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you;...

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