The Black Prince Sex Quotes

After my wife, and also before her, there were women about whom I shall not speak since they are irrelevant and unimportant. Sometimes I saw myself as an ageing Don Juan, but the majority of my conquests belonged to the world of fantasy. I wished in after years when it seemed too late to start that I had kept a diary. One's capacity to forget absolutely is immense. And this would have been some sort of monument with an almost guaranteed value. A sort of Seducer's Diary with metaphysical reflections might have been an ideal literary form for me, I have often thought. (Bradley Pearson's Foreword: par. 8)

Of course I was 'in love' with Christian when I married her, and I felt that I was lucky to get her. She was a showy pretty woman. […] Later, when I imagined I knew more about 'love', I decided that my feeling about Christian was 'just' overwhelming sexual attraction, plus a curious element of obsession. (1.10.2)

'How can you tell me that,' I said, 'with that air of vile satisfaction. Am I supposed to be pleased because you've fathered another bastard? Are you so proud of being an adulterer? I regard you both as wicked, an old man and a young girl, and if you only knew how ugly and pathetic you look, pawing each other and making a vulgar display of how pleased you are with yourselves for having got rid of my sister—You're like a pair of murderers—'. (1.11.55)

It is customary in this age to attribute a comprehensive and quite unanalysed causality to the 'sexual urges'. These obscure forces, sometimes thought of as particular historical springs, sometimes as more general and universal destinies, are credited with the power to make of us, delinquents, neurotics, lunatics, fanatics, martyrs, heroes, saints, or more exceptionally, integrated fathers, fulfilled mothers, placed human animals, and the like. Vary the mixture, and there's nothing 'sex' cannot be said to explain, by cynics and pseudo-scientists such as Francis Marloe […]." (1.17.1)

I would like to make it clear that any explanation along these lines is not only over-simplified and 'coarse', it is also entirely wide of the mark. In so far as I thought about the possibility of making love to Rachel (which by this time I did, but with a deliberately controlled vagueness) I did not, I was not such a shallow fool as to, imagine that a trivial sexual release would bring me the great freedom for which I had sought, nor had I in any way confused animal instinct with godhead. (1.17.3)

To lie fully clothed, with one's shoes on, beside a panting naked woman is not perhaps very gentlemanly. I raised myself on one elbow so that I could see her face. I did not want to be submerged by this warm gale. I looked intently down at her face. […] I touched her breasts, moving my hand over them lightly, scrutinizing them with my touch. I looked down and regarded her body, which was plump, fleshy. I drew my hand down over her stomach which contracted under my fingers. I felt excited, stunned, but this was not quite desire. (1.19.50)

'"Always" has no force here. I haven't been with a woman for many years. This privilege is unwonted and unexpected. And I cannot rise to it.' (1.19.52-54)

When sexual desire is also love it connects us with the whole world and becomes a new mode of experience. Sex then reveals itself as the great connective principle whereby we overcome duality, the force which made separateness as an aspect of oneness at some moment of bliss in the mind of God. (2.1.13)

When one has at last got what has been ardently longed for one wishes time to cease. Often indeed at such moments it is miraculously slowed. Looking into each other's eyes we caressed each other without any haste at all, with a sort of tender curious astonishment. […] My luxuriant sense of destiny had its nemesis however. I put the essential matter off too long and when I came to it it was over in a second. (3.3.5)

Later on, she was crying. There had been no doubt about this love-making. I lay exhausted and let her cry. Then I turned her round and let her tears mingle with the sweat which had darkened the thick grey hairs of my chest and made them cling to my hot flesh in flattened curls. I held her in a kind of horrified trance of triumph and felt between my hands the adorable racked sobbing of her body. (3.6.1)