Toni Cade Bambara Quotes

The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one's life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration.

Basically I'm trying to make men more sensitive and women stronger.

Women are more likely to have sex and fall in love, which can be tough because that's not the way men work.

The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

Guys don't like women telling them what to do. It reminds them of their mothers, or something like that.

Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught.

I’m going to change this frivolous attitude I’ve had towards womanizing.

Men who refrain from sexual acts are frequently stronger, owing to their conservation of energy.

A man's man has no problems with commitment, as long as he's not with a woman who needs to be committed.

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.

Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.

When women's sexuality is imagined to be passive or "dirty," it also means that men's sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right-no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men's minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we're encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that's detrimental to both men and women.

Celibacy is exhausting.

My main goal is to wait until I'm married to have sex. I would never, personally, be able to (have an abortion), because down the road it would always haunt me.

Nothing makes a woman more esteemed by the opposite sex than chastity; whether it be that we always prize those most who are hardest to come at, or that nothing besides chastity, with its collateral attendants, truth, fidelity, and constancy, gives a man a property in the person he loves, and consequently endears her to him above all things.

Chastity is sexual intercourse with affection.

[Virginity is] a cultural ideology that conflates passivity - the act of not having sex - with superior morality.

I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death.

Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

... chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.

Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.

Temperance is the nurse of chastity.

Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to love again. This labor of love is futile only when the men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on.