Everyone's sex life is funny except your own. Every person's is, and yours never is. The lengths people go to — and the extremes and the conditions and the mental exercises and guilt and shame and happiness that everybody goes through — and what they'll do for sex is never-ending and mind-boggling and very interesting to me. And I don't think a lot of times people choose any of it.

In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.

It is curious how little interested we are in the sexual desires of those who do not attract us.

The full splendour of sexual experience does not reveal itself without a new mode of attention to the world in general.

Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.

We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When an apparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo the enticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused.

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Do think it quite incomprehensible that a young girl — when it can be done — without any one knowing — should be glad to have a peep, now and then, into a world which — which she is forbidden to know anything about?

Il est du véritable amour comme de l’apparition des esprits : tout le monde en parle, mais peu de gens en ont vu.

The spectacle of ordinary gay men baffled me.

En el mundo había gente tan parecida entre sí que se los podría tomar por padres e hijos. Pero difícilmente existieran muchos en el mundo. Tal vez hubiera un solo hombre que pudiera corresponderse con una muchacha y una sola joven que combinara con un hombre. Solo uno para algún otro; y tal vez en todo el mundo una sola pareja posible. Viven como extraños, sin suponer ningún tipo de lazo entre ellos y hasta ignorantes de la existencia del otro.
Por casualidad suben a un mismo tren, se reúnen por primera vez y probablemente nunca vuelvan a encontrarse. Treinta minutos en el curso de toda una vida. Se separan sin decirse una palabra. Habiendo estado sentados uno al lado del otro, sin mirarse, sin darse cuenta del parecido, se alejan siendo parte de un milagro del que no tomaron conciencia.
Y el único admirado por la rareza de todo eso es un extraño que se pregunta si, al ser un accidental testigo, no estará participando de un milagro.

But in public who shall express the unseen adequately? It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.

I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all, — who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you.