Thy Neighbor's Wife QUOTES

1 " Whatever influence Bullaro’s normally cautious character might have exerted over the passions of his penis were now nonexistent, and he unhesitatingly followed her and quickly undressed. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

2 " Men admitted to being endlessly fascinated with the naked female form; they appreciated women in a detached, impersonal way that women, even those women who were flattered by such attention, rarely understood. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

3 " in a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an “economic interest” in the continued role of women as “the provider of children for the state” and the performer of household chores without pay. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

4 " Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

5 " He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

6 " While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

7 " Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity-known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision- evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women’s confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

8 " The penis, often regarded as a weapon, is also a burden, the male curse. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

9 " Too many people were obsessed with their heads and were alienated from their bodies, Perls believed, adding: “We have to lose our minds and come to our senses. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

10 " Group nudity could also be personally beneficial, according to psychologist Abraham M. Maslow, who believed that nudist camps or parks might be places where people can emerge from hiding behind their clothes and armor, and become more self-accepting, revealing, and honest. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

11 " An individual with genital character, according to Reich, was fully in contact with with his body, his drives, his environment- he possessed “orgastic potency,” the capacity to “surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any inhibition…free of anxiety and unpleasure and unaccompanied by fantasies”; and while genital character alone would not assure enduring contentment, the individual at least would not be blocked or diverted by destructive or irrational emotion or by exaggerated respect for institutions that were not life-enhancing. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

12 " Charlotte, N.C., 273 Chastity belt, 55 Chaucer, Geoffrey, "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

13 " In the chamber, [Frances Hamling] sat close to her husband [William Hamling, about to go before the US Supreme Court on 4/15/74], trying to repress the anxiety she felt about his future. Four years in prison and $87,000 in fines was hardly a matter of casual contemplation. Since nobody was supposed to speak or even whisper in the chamber, she diverted herself by glancing around at the room's opulent interior, the impressive bone-white china columns and red velvet draperies that formed the background behind the polished judicial bench and high black leather chairs. A gold clock hung down from between two pillars, signaling that it was 9:57 a.m. -- a few minutes before the justices' scheduled arrival. Along the upper edge of the front of the room, close to the top of the forty-four-foot ceiling, Frances noticed an interesting, voluptuous section of Classical art: It was a golden beige marble frieze that extended across the width of the room and showed about twenty nude and seminude men, women, and children gathered in various poses. The figures symbolized the embodiment of human wisdom and truth, righteousness, and virtue; but the bodies to her could as easily have represented an assemblage of Roman hedonists or orgiasts, and it struck her as ironic that such a scene should be hovering over the heads of the jurists who would be questioning her husband's use of illustrations in the Presidential Report on Obscenity and Pornography. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

14 " Unlike the millions who casually masturbate in solitude while looking at girlie pictures in Playboy and similar magazines, the massage man preferred an accomplice, an attendant lady of respectable appearance who would help him reduce the guilt and loneliness of this most lonely act of love. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

15 " The average married man, if he had the energy, could have sex with several women without diminishing the affection and desire he felt for his wife. But women like Judith- unlike truly liberated females like Barbara and Arlene- could not simply accept a man as a temporary instrument of pleasure; they wanted soft lights and promises, not just a penis but the man attached to it. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

16 " While the quest for adventure that had long plagued him now tempted him to remove his clothes, an even more persuasive force within him prevented him from doing so, mainly because he feared revealing for the first time in front of so many people that unpredictable organ he assumed was everyman’s burden- although, as he was apparent from the number of flaccid phalli he saw around him, no man seemed burdened tonight except himself. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

17 " In Connecticut the crime of oral sex could be punishable by a thirty-year jail term. In Ohio it was one to twenty years. In Georgia such a “crime against nature” could lead a practitioner to life imprisonment at hard labor- a penalty far more severe than having sex with animals, which in Georgia was punishable by only five years. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

18 " Many couples in the room merely watched the proceedings in wonderment, and to them the visit to Sandstone was a learning experience, a biology class, an opportunity to become increasingly knowledgeable about sex in the way that people traditionally learned about almost everything except sex, through the observation and imitation of other people. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

19 " In his parochial school, the nuns had advised him and his classmates that they should sleep each night on their backs with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders- a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife

20 " Many male habitues of massage parlors, like Talese, did not like solitary masturbation; in the parlance of the younger generation, it was a “downer.” And yet to be masturbated by an appealing masseuse, to be in the physical presence of a woman with whom there was some communication and understanding, if not love, was gratifying and fun. "

― Gay Talese , Thy Neighbor's Wife