Virginity

Sourced

• An isolated outbreak of virginity ... is a rash on the face of society. It arouses only pity from the married, and embarrassment from the single.
  • Charlotte Bingham, Lucinda, ch. 1 (1966)

• I always thought of losing my virginity as a career move.
  • Madonna, quoted in Madonna Unauthorized, epilogue, Christopher Andersen (1991)

• It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.
  • Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen (1955)

• ‘No, no; for my virginity,
  When I lose that,’ says Rose, ‘I’ll die’:
  ‘Behind the elms last night,’ cried Dick,
  ‘Rose, were you not extremely sick?’
  • Matthew Prior, A True Maid

• Some say no evil thing that walks by night,
  In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
  Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost
  That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
  No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine,
  Hath hurtful power o’er true virginity.
  • John Milton, Comus, l. 432-437

• Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Space Crone,” The Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer 1976)

• Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.
  • Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen (1955)

• Which people desire to lose what they possess? A sick man his fever, a tormented husband his wife, a gambler his debts, and a girl—her virginity.
  • Franz Grillparzer, Notebooks and Diaries (1808-1810)

• Women have ... by imitating the life condition of men, surrendered a very strong position of their own. Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin’s virginity: fucking. Men are afraid of crones, so afraid that their cure for virginity fails them; they know it won’t work. Faced with the fulfilled crone, all but the bravest men wilt and retreat, crestfallen and cockadroop.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Space Crone,” The Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer 1976)

• Your old virginity is like one of our French withered pears: it looks ill, it eats drily.
  • William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, act 1, sc. 1 (1623)

• It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
  • Voltaire, Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)

Unsourced

• Virginity for some women is the only virtue.
  • Gerald Barzan

• Woman is: finally screwing and your groin and buttocks and thighs ache like hell and you're all wet and maybe bloody and it wasn't like a Hollywood movie at all but Jesus at least you're not a virgin any more but is this what it's all about? And meanwhile, he's asking 'Did you come?'
  • Robin Morgan