"Erotical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sorrow, love, hatred, admiration, ennui, pride, fatigue, etc., may become a center of attraction that groups images or events having otherwise no rational relations between them, but having the same emotional stamp,—joyous, melancholy, erotic, etc. This form of association is very frequent in dreams and reveries, i.e., in a state of mind in which the imagination enjoys complete freedom and works haphazard. We easily see that this influence, active or latent, of the emotional factor, must cause ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... handwriting. No wonder that he despaired of his talent, concluded that he could never be a poet, and burnt his effusions. A maddening love-affair with his landlady's daughter, Anna Katharina Schoenkopf, revived the dying lyric flame, and he began to write verses in the gallant erotic vein then and there fashionable—verses that tell of love-lorn shepherds and shepherdesses, give sage advice to girls about keeping their innocence, and moralize on the ways of this wicked world. They show ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... inextinguishable and silent flame of her love, and, as he believed, illuminating the meditations of his soul. Folly! His apotheosis was a farce. She developed, but not spiritually. What he supposed was a pure flame of love proved to be a base erotic fever. The bloom of pudicity was brushed off. She acquired a strange power over him; she, the once innocent and frightened creature. "She possessed the infallible science and knew her lover's most secret and subtle ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard Crashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper. To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of English into Spain. In his Noble Numbers Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such men as Valdivielso, Ocana, Lope de Ubeda; ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... was brought back from Rochester raving of her love for a man she had never seen, and whose name alone had been associated in her mind with her fancy for copper table furniture. She died of acute mania within a month. In this case erotic tendencies, which had never been observed in her before, seemed to have been excited by some very indirect and complicated mental process, and these in their turn developed into general ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... simplest fact regarding its structure, so the Song of Songs had to wait even longer for a poet to reveal not only its beauty but its character. Commentators innumerable had interpreted it; St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters; Palestrina had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from Luther to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated it to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among scores of these strange imaginations ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... time, is probably 'The Rape of Lucrece.'" This may naturally be the verdict of a hasty reader at a first glance over the party-colored scenes of a really noble tragedy, crossed and checkered with the broadest and quaintest interludes of lyric and erotic farce. But, setting these eccentricities duly or indulgently aside, we must recognize a fine specimen of chivalrous and romantic rather than classical or mythological drama; one, if not belonging properly or essentially ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I am sorry I must assure my female readers that very few of them had reference to Mary Flood Jones. He had, however, very carefully packed up the tress, and could bring that out for proper acts of erotic worship at seasons in which his mind might be less engaged with affairs of state than it was at present. Would he make a failure of this great matter which he had taken in hand? He could not but tell himself that the chances were twenty to one against him. Now ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... softened hues over a delightful land of fiction: while the Welsh, in their emigration to Britanny, are believed to have brought with them their national fables. That subsequent race of minstrels, known by the name of Troubadours in the South of France, composed their erotic or sentimental poems; and those romancers called Troveurs, or finders, in the North of France, culled and compiled their domestic tales or Fabliaux, Dits, Conte, or Lai. Millot, Sainte Palaye, and Le Grand, have preserved, in their "Histories of the Troubadours," their literary ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is worthless; and the moral writers who embellish it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. You want the idea drawn out of obscuring matter, this can best be done by the symbol. The symbol, or the thing itself, that is the great artistic question. In earlier ages it was the symbol; a name, a plume, sufficed to evoke the idea; now we evoke nothing, for we give ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... chequered here and there by intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy, or caught in the garden with Maud—with intentions strictly honourable in both cases. The treatment of love by ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... these matters, Strindberg at length decided to write a book about woman, a subject, he declares, which up to this time he had not wanted to think about, as he himself "lived in a happy erotic state, ennobled and beautified by the rejuvenating and expiatory arrival of children." But nevertheless he decided to write such a book, and so with sympathy and much old-fashioned veneration for ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... that dip into politely erotic fiction seemed to canalize my poor little grass-grown mind into activity, and Diddums and I sat up until the wee sma' hours discoursing on life and letters. He started me off by somewhat pensively remarking that all women seem to want ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter, and the Liber Amoris, the obvious and irresistible attack of something like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly—but only partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... in a lighter and erotic vein. He had many admirers in his day who styled him the French Tibullus. His influence is perceptible in the ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... the mystics of Islam, and their poetry, while often externally anacreontic—bacchanalian and erotic—possesses an esoteric, spiritual signification: the sensual world is employed to symbolise that which is to be apprehended only by the inward sense. Most of the great poets of Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey are generally ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Greek literature; the already-mentioned Parthenius, one of the better known Alexandrian elegists, opened, apparently about 700, a school for literature and poetry in Rome, and the excerpts are still extant in which he supplied one of his pupils of rank with materials for Latin elegies of an erotic and mythological nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt. But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called into existence the Roman Alexandrinism; it was on the contrary a product—perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable— of the political and national ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... intended by her to have been worked up into a novel; both letters and narrative are too good to be the unaided composition of Gildon himself, but possibly Mrs. Behn in her after life may have elaborated and told him these erotic episodes to conceal the squalor and misery of the real facts of her early Dutch mission. It is proved indeed in aim and circumstance to have been ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... characteristic features of procedure in those romantic Middle Age halls of amatory justice, Chaucer's "Assembly of Fowls" is his real "Court of Love;" for although, in the castle and among the courtiers of Admetus and Alcestis, we have all the personages and machinery necessary for one of those erotic contentions, in the present poem we see the personages and the machinery actually at work, upon another scene and under other guises. The allegory which makes the contention arise out of the loves, and proceed in the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... retired in confusion behind another lady; and somehow there became diffused an impression that Miss Beam was erotic. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... aim was to follow it with literal and unexpurgated renderings of Catullus, Juvenal, and Ausonius, from the same tongue. Sir Richard laid great stress on the necessity of thoroughly annotating each translation from an erotic (and especially a paederastic) point of view, but subsequent circumstances caused me to abandon ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... of our subject, it appears to me possible that sexual love may cease to be the predominant theme in the lyrical poetry of the future. Erotic sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the imaginative art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late nineteenth century were interested to excess in love. There was a sort of obsession of sex among them, as though life presented ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... been set to work at giving the cabin a thorough overhauling. We fooled away much of our time looking into the captain's collections of erotic pictures and photographs ... and his obscene books in ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... father who won distinction as a poet and also as an opponent of the witch-burning mania. His collection of lyric poems called Trutz-Nachtigall, or Match-Nightingale, is interesting for its singular blend of erotic imagery with sincere religious feeling. The poems indicate a genuine delight in certain aspects of nature. The selections follow Wolff's edition, in ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... sight for a young man of fifteen like me, whom the old man admitted as the only and silent witness of these erotic scenes! The miserable mother applauded her daughter's reserve, and went so far as to lecture the elderly lover, who, in his turn, dared not refute her maxims, which savoured either too much or too little of Christianity, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I indulged in every variety of voluptuous pleasures; we needed no further instruction, but tried everything we could think of, even to pissing in each other's mouths, as a finale after a long bout of erotic excitements. ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... complex of sex. Both as regards the primary reproductive organs, their size and shape, and the character of their implantation, malformations and anomalies, as well as the physical and mental traits lumped as the secondary sexual, puberty, maturity, and senility, voice changes and erotic trends, virility and femininity, the internal secretions are dictators at every step. So significant are these, that even a rough summary of the discoveries and the outlook in the field involves ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... which confound religion with nervous excitement, and are more or less erotic in their character. The excitement necessary for prophesying is commonly produced by dancing, jumping, pirouetting, or self-castigation; and the absurdities spoken at such times are regarded as the direct expression of divine wisdom. The religious exercises ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Sonnets.—Scriptum Domini Protectoris contra Hispanos: Thirteen more Latin State-Letters of Milton for the Protector (Nos. LXV.-LXXVII.), with Special Account of Count Bundt and the Swedish Embassy in London: Count Bundt and Mr. Milton.—Increase of Light Literature in London: Erotic Publications: John Phillips in Trouble for such: Edward Phillips's London Edition of the Poems of Drummond of Hawthornden: Milton's Cognisance of the same.—Henry Oldenburg and Mr. Richard Jones ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... would never hit me on the back. He is one of the most gorgeous slopers we have got, and twangs his banjo for Dennison to sing what they call erotic ballads. You've not got ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... distinction from that of good powers. Civa represents the ascetic, dark, awful, bloody side of religion: Vishnu, the gracious, calm, hopeful, loving side; the former is fearful, mysterious, demoniac; the latter is joyful, erotic, divine. In their later developments it is not surprising to see that Vishnuism, in the form of Krishnaism, becomes more and more erotic, while Civaism becomes more and more ghastly and ghoulish. Wild and ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... drunken rejoicings. But when the crisis is over he takes his revenge, swaggering as the breadwinner, and speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension, even with chivalry, as if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... purposes, such as the election notices, the announcements of gladiatorial contests, of houses to rent, of articles lost and for sale, are in prose, but the lovelorn lounger inscribed his sentiments frequently in verse, and these verses deserve a passing notice here. One man of this class in his erotic ecstasy writes on the wall of a Pompeian basilica:[66] "May I perish if I'd wish to be a god without thee." That hope sprang eternal in the breast of the Pompeian lover is illustrated by the last two lines ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... gallantries, his power of fascination, and the names of the gifted and beautiful victims of his numerous amours might not become a secret in his grave. One can conceive nothing baser. The preservation of letters to satisfy an erotic mind is low enough, but deliberately to identify each anonymous or initialled letter with the full name of the writer, for the use of a biographer, is an act of treachery of which few men are capable. To the credit of Davis, these letters were ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... nothing heavy or material about Verlaine's response to erotic appeals. His nervous organisation was so finely strung that, when he loved, he loved with his whole nature, with body, soul and spirit, in a sort of quivering ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... naturally into three classes, corresponding to three currents of influence; and all three frequently appear in the work of one man, not blended, but distinct. One is the conventional love-poem of the Galician school, seldom containing a fresh or personal note. Another is the stilted allegory with erotic or historical page xvi content, for whose many sins Dante was chiefly responsible, though Petrarch, he of the Triunfi, and Boccaccio cannot escape some blame. Third is a vein of highly moral reflections upon the vanity of life and certainty of death, sometimes running to political satire. ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... in his lectures eliminated things divine by erotic imagery, had no doubt observed, like some Catholic writers, the intimate resemblance between ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... extension. Thus, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, of Osaka, the greatest dramatist that his country ever possessed, composed plays which have earned for him the title of the "Shakespeare of Japan;" and as for the light literature of the era, though it was disfigured by erotic features, it faithfully reflected in other respects the social conditions ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... war-songs express a stirring, martial spirit; and a noble nature, accompanied with strong passions, appears in all his poems, especially in those in which he sings the praises of love and wine, though little of his erotic poetry has reached our time. It is evident that poetry was not with him a mere pastime or exercise of skill, but a means of pouring out the inmost feelings of the soul. Sappho (fl. 600 B.C.) the other leader of the Aeolic school of poetry, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one's own the praeterita (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him—not to live but—to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... zeal, Liuben Karaveloff (1837-1879), journalist and novelist, Christo Boteff (1847-1876), lyric poet, whose ode on the death of his friend Haji Dimitr, an insurgent leader, is one of the best in the language, and Petko Slaveikoff (died 1895), whose poems, patriotic, satirical and erotic, moulded the modern poetical language and exercised a great influence over the people. Gavril Krstovitch, formerly governor-general of eastern Rumelia, and Marin Drinoff, a Slavist of high repute, have ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... countrymen as a standard work; while foreigners look at it as a valuable historical poem indeed, but as utterly deficient in true epic power and original invention. His smaller poems and prose writings are replete with wit and spirit; to see a bishop writing erotic songs and satirical epigrams was nothing extraordinary in his time. As a prose writer be appears as one of the few who were not blind to the defects and follies of their countrymen. Of his translations we mention Macpherson's Ossian and Plutarch. He ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... is quite marked. Heschl reported a case of a man of forty-five in whom absence of the olfactory sense was associated with imperfect development of the genitals; it is also well known that olfactory hallucinations are frequently associated with psychoses of an erotic type. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... heroine of the erotic papyrus of Turin bears the title of "Singing-woman of Amon," and the illustrations indicate her profession so clearly and so expressively, that no details of her sayings ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... refused and until his death in 774 he was a considerable personage at Court, receiving high rank and titles. The Chinese Tripitaka contains 108 translations[661] ascribed to him, mostly of a tantric character, though to the honour of China it must be said that the erotic mysticism of some Indian tantras never found favour there. Amogha is a considerable, though not auspicious, figure in the history of Chinese Buddhism, and, so far as such changes can be the work of one man, on him rests the responsibility of making it become ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... "The erotic motive is almost entirely absent from American poetry. Even our younger American poets are more profoundly interested in the why and wherefore of things than in the girdle of Helen or the gleaming limbs of 'the white implacable ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... Titian becomes more and more merely sensuous in his conception of the beauty of women. He betrays in his loss of serenity that he is less than heretofore impervious to the stings of an invading sensuality, which serves to make of his mythological and erotic scenes belonging to this late time a tribute to the glories of the flesh unennobled by the gilding touch of the purer flame. And the painter who, when Charles V. retired into his solitude, had suffered the feeble flame of his life ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... ladies who had mislaid their fans blushed as they listened to the old gentleman, whose brilliant elocution won their indulgence for certain details which we have suppressed, as too erotic for the present age; nevertheless, we may believe that each lady complimented him in private; for some time afterwards he gave to each of them, as also to the masculine guests, a copy of this charming story, twenty-five copies of which ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... the palatial private car, and were introduced to a number of other guests. Among them was Major Venable; and while Oliver buried himself in the new issue of the fantastic-covered society journal, which contained the poem of the erotic "Ysabel," his brother chatted with the Major. The latter had taken quite a fancy to the big handsome stranger, to whom everything in the city was so ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... ecclesiastical 'Columbary' where aged, unsightly and repentant doves might moult, and renew their plumage. Musical, dramatic, poetic recitations, and tableaux vivants constituted the method of collecting the money, and the selections would have made Rabelais chuckle. We had the most flagitiously erotic passages (rendered in costume) from opera and opera bouffe, living reproductions of the tragic pose of Paolo and Francesca that would hare inspired Cabanel anew; of 'Ginevra Da Siena,' of 'Vivien,'—a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... The slightly erotic excitement, which is apt to take hold upon the spirits at the end of a dinner graced by fair women and flowers, betrayed itself in the tone of the conversations, and the reminiscences of this bazaar, at which the ladies—urged on by a noble spirit ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... overcome these primitive impulses, but we are far from being so civilized as we thought. The evil impulses, as we call them, which we supposed had at least been transformed are changed only in the sense that they have been influenced by the erotic motive, or have been repressed by an outer restraint, an educational factor, the demands of what we call civilized environment. But let us not deceive ourselves; the old impulses are still alive; the number of people who have been transformed by ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... seriousness and good faith apparently, opposed to the sentimental emotions—as the lower to the higher. To indulge the former is to be "Shandian," that is to say, coarse and carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend one's days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex indiscriminately, is ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... of Charles Giddey, a worthless and conceited egotist, I have no complaint to make. It is one of the best things of its kind that I have read for a long time. But it seems unlikely, to say the least, that the heroine, after being deserted by the man she really loves, should, considering her very erotic and unprincipled temperament, find complete happiness in the publication of a successful novel and in devotion to her child. I feel that on a nature like that of Rachel Cohen even Royalties and Press notices would eventually pall. And in pausing I may remark that the beast Glatisant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... endless gratification, and endless pain. These, however, are imprisoned in the heart of a mortal; no wonder, therefore, if it seems like to burst, and can find no expression for the announcements of endless joy or endless pain. This it is that forms the substance of all erotic poetry that is sublime in character, which, consequently, soars into transcendent metaphors, surpassing everything earthly. This is the theme of Petrarch, the material for the St. Preuxs, Werthers, and Jacopo Ortis, who otherwise could be neither understood ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... translation of the Bhagavata Parana, and Theodore Pavie's "Krichna et sa doctrine." ... The same theme has inspired some of the strangest productions of Hindoo art: for examples, see plates 65 and 66 of Moor's "Hindoo Pantheon" (edition of 1861). For accounts of the erotic mysticism connected with the worship of Krishna and the Gopia, the reader may also be referred to authorities cited in Barth's "Religions of India"; De Tassy's "Chants populaires de l'Inde"; and Lamairesse's "Poesies populaires du ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... in 18th century France was very great. The current English version, Grainger's (1755) with its cheap verse and common-place gallantries, is a stupid echo of the French feeling for Tibullus as an erotic poet. Much better is the witty prose version by the elder Mirabeau, done during the Terror, in the prison at Vincennes, and published after his release, with a ravishing portrait of "Sophie," surrounded by Cupids and billing doves. One of the old ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... leaving college, to enter the Middle Temple, in order to study law. With equal acuteness and adaptation to character, he dedicated the poems to the Prince of Wales, an anacreontic hero. As might be expected, with such a patron, the volume was a success. In 1801 he published another series of erotic poems, under the title The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little. This gained for him, in Byron's line, the name of "the young Catullus of his day"; and, at the instance of Lord Moira, he was appointed poet-laureate, a ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... Porphyrogenitus at least he looks; Haughty as one who rivalry scarce brooks; Unreminiscent now of youthful rage, Almost "respectable," and well-nigh sage, Dame GRUNDY owns her once redoubted foe, Whose polished paganry's erotic flow, And red anarchic wrath 'gainst priests, and kings, The virtues, and most other "proper" things, Once drew her frown where now her smile's bestowed. Such is the power of timely palinode! Soft twanged his lyre ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... without an equal as a poet of sacred songs; and many of the best hymns which are heard in the Protestant churches of Germany date from the seventeenth century. Soon, however, this class of poetry also degenerated on one side into dry theological phraseology, on the other into sentimental and almost erotic affectation. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... not ribald enough to tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it—as a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... drinking it, were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia. The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker. It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass—argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic—according to your temperament. Whatever your temperament it gave you a thundering head next morning, and a throat like Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. It was known as ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... much relief. Flambeau had known Quinton in wild student days in Paris, and they had renewed the acquaintance for a week-end; but apart from Flambeau's more responsible developments of late, he did not get on well with the poet now. Choking oneself with opium and writing little erotic verses on vellum was not his notion of how a gentleman should go to the devil. As the two paused on the door-step, before taking a turn in the garden, the front garden gate was thrown open with violence, and a young man with a billycock hat ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... ode in the English language, and Milton's equally famous description of Paradise in the fourth book of his Epic, owe a good deal to direct imitation of the Song of Songs. It is scarcely an exaggeration to assert that the stock-in-trade of many an erotic poet is simply the phraseology of the divine song which we have been considering so inadequately. It did not start as a repertoire; it has ended ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... alike equal to that of the Stoics and of the serious Epicureans as in Ecclesiastes and the Proverbs; everywhere marvellous imagination, always concise at least, if not restrained; lyrical sensuality which recalls the most perturbed creations of erotic Greeks and Latins, whilst surpassing them in beauty as in the Song of Songs; and throughout there is this grandeur, this simple majesty, this easy and natural sublimity which in the same degree is to be found only occasionally in Homer and which appears to be the privilege of the people who ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... more since I knew more of the girl than Mr Powell—if only her true name; and more of Captain Anthony—if only the fact that he was the son of a delicate erotic poet of a markedly refined and autocratic temperament. Yes, I knew their joint stories which Mr Powell did not know. The chapter in it he was opening to me, the sea-chapter, with such new personages as the sentimental and apoplectic chief mate and the morose steward, however astounding to him ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... in—to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. The poet's imagination is often far more licentious than his life; the "poet's licence" is rightly understood to be limited to his language. To have written erotic verses is almost a certificate of respectability: the energy that might have been expended in action has run to rhyme. Qui ose tout dire arrive a tout faire, say the French. Arrives at, perhaps, though even this is doubtful, but certainly does not start from that platform. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... many a fine woman, perfect too in the art of fucking, have I enjoyed, but the novelty and the charm, the variety and the superiority of the teacher, all combined to make this night the ne plus ultra of erotic pleasure. ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... It was in this book-lined apartment that Sir Jacques had transacted the affairs of the ugly little church at Mid Hatton and the volumes burdening the leather-edged shelves were of a character meet for the eye of an elder. The smaller erotic collection in the locked bureau in the study presumably had companioned Sir Jacques' more ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... by asking certain requirements of every piece. If it be a drama, it must have healthfulness and comedy as well as seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... reign of subtle immorality," I sighed, "is well-nigh over. Already the augurs of the pen begin to wink as they fable of a race of men who are evilly scintillant in talk and gracefully erotic. We know that this, alas, cannot be, and that in real life our peccadilloes dwindle into dreary vistas of divorce cases and the police-court, and that crime has lost its splendour. We sin very carelessly—sordidly, at times,—and artistic wickedness is rare. It is a pity; life was once a ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... style, and Horace's Ars Poetica written many years later shows that Vergil had to the very end been criticized by the extremists for taking liberties with the language. The epigram begins as though it were an erotic poem in the style of Philodemus. Then, having used the Greek word pothos, he checks himself as though dreading a frown from Varius, and substitutes the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... variations in the structure and distribution of the sensory corpuscles—i.e. the real organs of the sexual sense, which develop in certain papillae of the corium of the phallus, and have been evolved from ordinary tactile corpuscles of the corium by erotic adaptation ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel |
