The Virgin Way Quotes

“Oh, no. This has "marriage" written all over it. Travis, read my lips: remember that Fellini film with the prostitute who says that every new sunrise makes her a virgin? It doesn't work that way with me. Even the sun thinks I'm a slut.”

— Steve Kluger

“The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul
lust.”

— Marina Warner

“Lance rolled his eyes. "I'm already sorrier than you could possibly imagine. Now you promise me you won't interfere, or mention it to anyone, or poke your nose in, or follow Mr. Traynor along the street when he comes into town, ... "
Lily snorted. "As if I would tell anyone! You think I want it spread around that my son's into puppy play?"
Lance felt his temper supernova. Yes, that was really quite an interesting sensation, the way the cells inside his chest spontaneously burst into flame. "I AM NOT INTO PUPPY PLAY! AND HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW THAT TERM?"
Lily waved her hand as if he was being silly. "Please. Like I was born fifty years old."
"I want to be stricken dead. Right now," Lance groaned and hid his face.
"Oh, all right. Fine! You're doing some reconnaissance in your dog form, and that's all it is, and it's none of my business, and I've always been a virgin. You and your brothers and sister were all conceived by supernatural means. Happy?”

— Eli Easton

“What do you mean, ruined?"
From the way Emily swallows slowly, you'd think we were talking about smoking crack. "Compromised. By ... by another man."
"Oh!" I say, too loudly. "You mean, if the girl's not a virgin, the guy won't marry her?"
She nods, her eyes wide, as if being a non-virgin is akin to being an ax-murder.”

— Mandy Hubbard

“And I want you to know," Max said kindly to him, "I don't hold you in any way responsible."
Lysander frowned. "For what?"
"For sending me an assistant who wanted to take over New York with the help of a virgin-raping,mundane-eating demon."
Lysander stiffened. "I am not 'in any way responsible' for that!"
"You did authorize the assignment," I reminded him.
"Well, I- I-" Lysander cleared his throat. "The decision was made at headquarters. All I did was sign
the standard paperwork.”

— Laura Resnick

“Are you seeing Jesus yet? Eric the ayahuasca virgin asks me this morning over a late brunch at the Yellow Rose ... We're trading visions like trading card stats, comparing our different curanderos and gossiping like schoolgirls while the street vendors and fabric hustlers stand around by the dozen ... 'Am I becoming like Jesus would probably be a better way to explain it,' I respond, and it's true. I feel like I'm walking on water. The aftermath of the ayahuasca experience is glorious: I feel lighter, clearner, like a hard drive that's been defragged and all my pathways are re-linked up to each other, whole, and able to express joy once again. This is what it fees like to be healed, my whole body radiates from the inside-out.”

— Rak Razam

“He touched me. We kissed and we held hands sometimes. It was proper. Do you think I should have been with him in that way?" "Hell, no. He's probably not capable." "He's married now. They have children." "Must be Catholic." "What makes you say that?" "Virgin births.”

— Ellen O'Connell

“Mom made me say it over and over, Keep it hidden, keep it safe. If anyone truly knew everything, it would freak them out in a large way. It freaks the shit out of me too, so I get it. I have no clue how I know this stuff, I just do. Like how I know the orders of angels and demons, or can tell on sight if an apparition is a ghost or a time slip, or if someone's a virgin, or if they've ever killed anyone.
Why can't I just know how to play Xbox or baseball?
It's like I fell from the fucking sky.”

— Rachel A. Marks

“This is our siblings of more famous BookWorld Personalities self-help group expalined Loser (Gatsby). That's Sharon Eyre, the younger and wholly disreputable sister of Jane; Roger Yossarian, the draft dodger and coward; Rupert Bond, still a virgin and can't keep a secret; Tracy Capulet, who has slept her way round Verona twice; and Nancy Potter, who is a Muggle.”

— Jasper Fforde

“People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that's what you want? I'd be lost if people like that got their way and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers ... I'm happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no one gives a shit and no one knows who you are. My mum & dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I'm like Der. That's the point.”

— Nick Hornby

“I can picture the way he looked, and recall the weather, and the play of light across his stubbled face, but that virgin moment is impossible to recapture.”

— Hannah Kent

“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Did your patron specify a motif? Usually I do a standard Virgin Mary from the waist up, and in this case I will throw in Babe Jesus for free, since you have come all this way.”

— Anne Fortier

“You may be a virgin in body, but not in mind. I feel the heat and passion in you; there's a fury of it inside you. I felt it the moment I saw you. You're not normal. You'll never be normal. Give it up. Stop trying to fit in a world that will never accept you. Nobody can understand you the way I can. You're a Sidhe-seer. You want to spend you're whole life denying it? What you see. What you are. What you want. Sad way to live and die.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved-by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?”

— Joseph Campbell

“Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer.”

— Theodore William Richards

“This man was a rogue, not because circumstances forced him to be a criminal but because he was born that way. He was probably conning his mother out of her milk the moment he could grin. He'd charm the clothes off a virgin in twenty minutes. And if the poor fool took him home, he'd drink her dad under the table, beguile her mother, charm her grandparents, and treat the girl to a night she'd never forget. In the morning, her dad would be sick with alcohol poisoning, the good silver would be missing together with the family car, and in a month, both the former virgin and her mother would be expecting.”

— Ilona Andrews

“Really? Then why is it my memories from that time are locked up tighter than a virgin in an iron maiden chastity belt that's been welded shut? I had always had a way with words.”

— Eve Langlais

“Holy shit. This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer that can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted ... of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?”

— Thomas Pynchon

“It is very possible to have lives that are just as prosperous, and nicer, that use 5 percent of the fossil fuels and virgin materials we do now. But if we're living anything like the average McMansion-ite, SUV-driving suburbanites, there's simply no way that can be powered in a climate-friendly way.”

— Alex Steffen

“There were railroads in the wilderness now; people who used to go overland by carriage or horseback to the River landings for the Memphis and New Orleans steamboats could take the train from almost anywhere now. And presently Pullmans too, all the way from Chicago and the Northern cities and the Northern money, the Yankee dollars arriving between sheets and even in drawing rooms to open the wilderness, nudge it further and further toward obsolescence with the whine of saws; what had been one vast unbroken virgin span was now booming with cotton and timber both. Or rather, booming with simple money: increment's troglodyte which had fathered twin ones: solvency and bankruptcy, the three of them booming money into the land so fast now that the problem was to get rid of it before it whelmed you into strangulation.”

— William Faulkner

“And why does Father want me out there?
You do know it's a myth what they say about virgin sacrifices and dragons,
yes?"
"Of course I know that," he snapped in such a way that Dagmar knew
he believed the myth to be true. "And after them three marriages, you ain't
much of a virgin yourself, now is ya?"
"Those last two barely counted.”

— G.A. Aiken

“And by the way, my dear,' he said, 'you might just mention to Mrs. Sutton that if she must read the morning paper before I come down, I should be obliged if she would fold it neatly afterwards.'
'What an old fuss-box you are, darling,' said his wife.
Mr. Mummery sighed. He could not explain that it was somehow important that the morning paper should come to him fresh and prim, like a virgin.
Women did not feel these things. ("Suspicion")”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

“I buy extra virgin olive oil by the case (much less expensive this way) and reach for it several times a day. I use it to marinate and cook my protein, saute my vegetables, and drizzle on my salads.”

— Suzanne Somers

“Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way?”

— Leonard Cohen

“Tessio Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of 22. Their engagement,which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father's flame,keeping him at a low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm ... She didn't surrender until after Japan had.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Here's your hat, and by the way, I'm a virgin”

— Lisa Kleypas

“We women, when we're searching for a meaning to our lives or for the path of knowledge, always identify with one of four classic archetypes.
The Virgin (and I'm not speaking here of a sexual virgin) is the one whose search springs from her complete independence, and everything she learns is the fruit of her ability to face challenges alone.
The Martyr finds her way to self-knowledge through pain, surrender and suffering.
The Saint finds her true reason for living in unconditional love and in her ability to give without asking anything in return.
Finally, the Witch justifies her existence by going in search of complete and limitless pleasure.”

— Paulo Coelho

“People are just really overreacting. It's just feel good music. We at Virgin are in no way promoting sex or whatever these media outlets continue to print.”

— Jermaine Dupri

“Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world.. I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome.”

— Marcus Borg

“I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet. To be rid of the influence of civilization. I only want to do simple, very simple art and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in my mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.”

— Paul Gauguin

“I try my jokes onstage. The only way to really find out if something is going to work is to try it on stage, and I try to be careful and bookend something new with a strong bit before and a strong bit afterwards. But it's fun to run on virgin snow. I like that feeling onstage of creating new footprints and not knowing what's going to happen.”

— Brian Regan

“I didn't tell him I was a virgin, just that I hadn't done it 'that much.' It hurt a little more than I'd expected but in a different way, and he was nervous too and he never came. Afterwards we lay there and talked, and I could tell he was a really nice person. I commended myself for making a healthy, albeit hasty, partner choice. I really couldn't wait to tell my mom.”

— Lena Dunham

“There's a difference in our ages [with Leonardo DiCaprio], but we were both in the same sort of position [on The Quick and the Death movie].Everyone below us in a casting position were all these really famous character actors like Keith David. And they were looking at the two of us going, 'Who are these guys?' So that naturally kind of put us together in a way where we'd just hang out together because we didn't care about status. We just wanted to enjoy the experience. The two things that have changed about Leo [ DiCaprio] since that time: he can drink legally and he's no longer a virgin.”

— Leonardo DiCaprio

“Because I don't see Virgin as a company but as a way of life and I fully enjoy it, I don't think I'll ever retire.”

— Richard Branson