Best 137 quotes in «abyss quotes» category

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")

I open my eyes. I want to know: what is in the abyss of a kiss? Are stars born in these black caves that house bated breaths and unspoken words? Do our souls crawl on these tender cheeks to greet one another by ivory gates? What happens when we kiss? Where do you go? Don’t tell me. For I have lost my desire to know. Kiss me so that I forget myself. I close my eyes and fall in the abyss.

It was as if some magnetic repulsion, which before had kept our two carriages from meeting and passing, had now been reversed, and so sucked me inexorably forward, drawing me towards something my heart made clear I feared - or should fear - utterly, in the way some people are fatally attracted towards an abyss while standing on its very edge.

I stood on the edge of that abyss between man and beast and played my harp for you, checking each note, one by one, to see if it would reach you.

It’s easy to be led to the abyss.

I shall crave for love at the bottom of the abyss, until I find you... (fragment from "Awaiting your arrival", chapter Hope)

I will dive into my chaos, and my Abyss will turn it into an art scene.

I was hopelessly looking for the sky in the abyss But it turned out that it is in your eyes

I wasn't entirely awake, but I couldn't cross the line into sleep. 'Go. Go on. The abyss is right there. Just a few more steps.' But I was too tired to break through the glass.

I will keep falling deep down into my abyss, until my chaos turns it into an art scene.

Love fills the infinite.

O sun, heart of the heavens whose blood of light Infuses the vigor which transmutes to azure The black ice strangler of great space obscure I hate you, mask of gold, mist and fire, circular Blind monster blinding all the prey around You who veil the impure dazzling phantasm To the loving vertigo of my avid gazes The visions of the colorless abyss of the void Reversed hollow truth-mask of the other world.

Many are charmed into paying cash for access, but may be unconscious of their petrifying downward spiral and the steady descent into the abyss of a lobby gate. ( “Bribe payers’ index” )

Most of the time, we try to tell ourselves "I'm confident" or "I'm doing well." But then, in a moment alone at home, you feel how close you are to some kind of abyss.

Not a bad thing to know something about darkness. You can’t talk about light without some knowledge of darkness. Like your buddy Nietzsche said, 'He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Reality. I am stuck. I am hostage to my own destination.  When I close my eyes, my wings can take me anywhere in the universe. I abandon myself and I soar. Where only the most profound and intense souls can withstand the sick atmospheres.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

Sometimes I trembled From the horror of my abyss.

Send a coin into the abyss and wish for a blissful kiss

Spinning the webs of meaning keeps me together, balancing my own pleasures and responsibilities with other's prevents me from falling into the abyss of emptiness.

The abyss is black and eventually I know I will smile, laugh even knowing all I think I know, maniacally while I howl at anything I could see that would laugh, snarl and howl the way I do.

Step, step, step, I fall and they lift me, slip-slop, slip-slop, through the watery mud. Each step is a heartbeat on my way to the grave, and the longest walk I will ever take. Plip, plip, I slip and they gather me. How strong are these savages, and how tight is their grip! Plip, plip, plip patters the rain, and I fall, and I call, and I stall for more time. But my time has run out.

The abyss doesn't stare back. It winks.

The abyss of absence. But who'll say: don't cry at night?

The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.

There is no feeling that is comparable to that of being truly lost. I don’t mean lost in the woods, or desert, but lost in the way that only can happen internally. Lost to the deepest, blackest pit of your soul, clinging to ghosts of past times, when you thought you knew who and what you were. When this happens, you have two choices; you can give in to your darkest inclinations, and accept what you are, or you can fight, knowing that it is a losing battle, that the good half of your soul is strong, but can never erase the bad part.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

There was no justice in rebellion. This Javert had come to believe after seeing Marseille fall headfirst into the abyss of the revolution.

There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.

The self who is undone in the encounter with the abyss, that is, the preabyssal self, lives with a misguided consciousness. Without having faced or embraced the vertiginous depths beneath the precarious ground of its being, this self views itself as coherent and independent. I am here referring to the self who operates in clearly demarcated binaries and boundaries, the self who views God as distinct from the world, the other as separate from the "I," the spiritual as distinct from the physical. Conversely, the new self that emerges—if it does at all—from the abyss understands its nature not as an immutable substance but as multiple, fragmented, and always-in-becoming. In the abyss the old self is dissolved, emptied, abandoned, annihilated, lost, crushed, dismembered, shattered, and drowned.

The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss: It longed for the adventure of Ignorance

The woman turns away; one wing blackens like an onyx gem while the other glows white like a bright spotlight. She flies into the sky, leaving the crowd staring in astonishment. Angels fly away in two directions. Half make a black storm of moving, twisting shapes. The other half forms a white-as-snow moving cloud. The ranks are divided.

This is th' abyss. Behold wherein I lurk The lazar-house my mind, wherein do work The horrid charnel-priests, whose loathly song Sickens my soul, and quells the spirit strong.

This is why the deepest form of pain comes out as silence.

There was an image in my mind—an expectation of what it would be like when I finally gave myself fully to a man. It wasn’t like this. It was always at night with candles flickering lazily, music filling the air with a sexy melody, and maybe a bubble bath. But no. It was infinitely better, and there was no froo froo, stereotypical scene that played out. It was incredible. Brilliant. Amazing. Indescribable, really. Like all the planets in the galaxy aligned for a perfect moment in time. As if this was the beginning of time. From now until the rest of eternity, everything finally had meaning.

Soon the air of the high place was blowing in through the gaps in the masonry, the open bays, where the wind flowed like water round the arches of a bridge. Borluut felt refreshed fanned by this sea-breeze coming from the beaches of the sky: It seemed to be sweeping up dead leaves inside him. New paths, leading elsewhere, appeared in his soul; fresh clearings were revealed. Finally he found himself. Total oblivion as a prelude to taking possession of one's self! He was like the first man on the first day to whom nothing has yet happened. The delights of metamorphosis. He owed them to the tall tower, to the summit he had gained where the battlemented platform was ready for him, a refuge in the infinite. From that height he could no longer see the world, he no longer understood it. Yes, each time he was seized with vertigo, with a desire to lose his footing, to throw himself off, but not towards the ground, into the abyss with its spirals of belfries and roofs over the depths of the town below. It was the abyss above of which he felt the pull. He was more and more bewildered. Everything was becoming blurred - before his eyes, inside his head - because of the fierce wind, the boundless space with nothing to hold on to, the clouds he had come too close to, which long continued to journey on inside him. The delights of sojourning among the summits have their price.

To have reservations is to show true leadership. To have certainty without question, to lead people to battle with no qualms, or to prosecute without hesitation are qualities of a tyrant.

To see someone you love in so much pain—especially emotional pain that can’t be remedied—was the worst form of torture.

What an abyss of ignorance hiding under the guise of love and care!

we all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss

We both must burn this midnight oil together. You’re just as new to me as I am you.” --Andrew

We must avoid coming to too close quarters with life. It is a slender crust over which you must walk without bearing down too hard. Hit your heel into it and you make a hole in which you will disappear. True philosophy has never consisted in probing all problems, but often on the contrary eluding them. We are skirting an abyss: beware of vertigo.

What is more thrilling than BASE jumping into the abyss of one’s imagination?

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:'We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust!' The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. ("Hanka")

When they speak of Hell there's something they miss there's a worse place to be and it's called the Abyss.

Before me is the abyss. How can I leap across it? And if I do not leap, how shall I ever be able to reach God?

When I came to see you It hurt me how thin you had become In the months of addiction & disease & although your particular abyss Was a man & not a drug The degradation was the same The same wasting of the flesh The same tapped-out well emptied Of the least leaf of emotion The same frozen rage

Art is what remains of religion: the dance above the yawning abyss.

When a man is standing at the top of a cliff, it isn’t fear of falling that keeps him rooted to the edge — it’s the fear of not being able to resist the desire to jump, just to see what falling feels like.

When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.