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Quotes from The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders — Colin Wilson

1931–2013 England

← All quotes by Colin Wilson

4 quotes

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)

This is a strange -- and rather alarming -- realisation. For it clearly implies that masturbation is one of our highest faculties that human beings have developed. Many animals masturbate -- but never without the presence of another animal, or some similar stimulus. A human being can masturbate in an empty room: a triumph of pure imagination.

The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)

The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.

The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)

This in turn suggests an answer to our question: what happened between the birth of De Sade and the birth of Krafft-Ebbing? The rise of the novel taught Europe to use its imagination. And when imagination was applied to sex, the result was the rise of pornography -- and of "sexual perversion."

The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Colin Wilson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.