Pleasure, the outer edge of ecstasy, was in the dour days of Protestantism, considered sinful in itself, wherever gained; Rome held specifically that… - Theodore Sturgeon

Is it men’s disgust of women that makes so many of them treat women with such contempt? Is it that which makes it so easy to point out that the Don Juans and the Lotharios, for all their hunger for women, are often merely trying to see how many women they can punish?

But why write such rotten scripts? If what you say is so, everybody’s where they want to be, even beggars with sores on their shins and starving children and guys being tortured in jails?” She nodded, watching me. I said, “I can’t accept that.”
She waited a bit and then almost smiled. “Unacceptable?” She asked softly.
And that rang a bell. “Unacceptable … ‘to accept the unacceptable.’ You said that, in the seminar. But I can’t remember why you said it.”
“Yes you can,” she said, and waited. I drew a total blank this time, and I guess she knew it, because she gave me a nudge: “You say you don’t belong here. Is ‘here’ — unacceptable?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “Then,” she asked, “why did you write this script?” “You mean — the me out there?” She nodded. I thought about that, and then mumbled, “I put it down to — curiosity? That’s all. I mean, throwing yourself into imperfect places, into pain and disappointment and well, the unacceptable — it just doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t?”
“It sure doesn’t … unless …” I felt my eyes get big. “Unless those, uh, entities want to do what you said — to learn to accept the unacceptable. Even if they have to create it. That doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t? Suppose they can’t go on unless they learn that.”
“Go on? Go on where?” She shrugs. “Everything living has to go on. Seed to shrub, shrub to tree, egg to bird.”
“You mean — evolve. They have to learn to accept the unacceptable in order to evolve into — whatever’s next for them.” Surprisingly, she laughed. She said, “You keep on saying ‘they.

She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning's hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belongs to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.