65
" how shall I get through the months or years of my future life, in company with that man -- my greatest enemy -- for none could injure me as he has done? Oh! when I think how fondly, how foolishly I have loved him, how madly I have trusted him, how constantly I have laboured, and studied, and prayed, and struggled for his advantage, and how cruelly he has trampled on my love, betrayed my trust, scorned my prayers and tears, and efforts for his preservation --crushed my hopes, destroyed my youth's best feelings, and doomed me to a life of hopeless misery -- as far as man can do it -- it is not enough to say that I no longer love my husband -- I HATE him! The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession, but it is true: I hate him -- I hate him! "
― Anne Brontë , The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
66
" I would like to have a dollar for every person in a courtship who knew he or she had felt the guidance of the Lord in that relationship, had prayed about the experience enough to know it was the will of the Lord, knew they loved each other and enjoyed each other’s company, and saw a lifetime of wonderful compatibility ahead—only to panic, to get a brain cramp, to have total catatonic fear sweep over them. They ‘draw back,’ as Paul said, if not into perdition at least into marital paralysis. I am not saying you shouldn’t be very careful about something as significant and serious as marriage…Yes, there are cautions and considerations to make, but once there has been genuine illumination, beware the temptation to retreat from a good thing. If it was right when you prayed about it and trusted it and lived for it, it is right now. Don’t give up when the pressure mounts. "
― Jeffrey R. Holland
79
" Prior to having sex for the first time, I had read many books and magazines, pornographic and otherwise, and I'd developed certain expectations of intercourse. From paperback romances I expected to feel vaguely yet ecstatically ravished, as if, for the duration of the act, I would experience everything an ad for a drugstore cologne could ever promise. From more serious fiction, I assumed that I would be blasted with a torrent of conflicting emotions, flashbacks to my birth, a rough kinship with the natural world, perhaps a Booker Prize, and, ultimately, a sense of existential ennui. From mainstream movies, I hoped for a beautifully lit and choreographed series of thrusts and embraces, with my head thrown back, my eyes shut but not squinched, and my lips slightly but appealingly parted; I also felt that the sex might be edited, continually leaping forward in the attractive bits and pieces, with only the dewiest bodily fluids. From porn, I trusted that sex would be alternately savage, degrading, pounding, and dull, and all of this sounded promising. From what my parents had told me, I knew that sex did not exist, and from what other schoolchildren had let on, I imagined that there was a real danger of getting stuck in one position or another, with the parties involved finally getting yanked apart in the emergency room. "
― Paul Rudnick , I Shudder and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey