And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex: that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different.

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.

You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

There are consequences of sexual violence in conflicts. The first is HIV and AIDS, [but also] kids who are born from rape, unwanted pregnancies.

Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences.

Sex is nostalgia for sex.

At some point, consequences matter.

Some things are better than sex, and some are worse, but there's nothing exactly like it.

It was horrible, Paul. But it was a bit more complicated than that, wasn't it ? Sex often is

We have, as a result of two thousand years of Christianity, sex on the brain. Which isn't always the best place for it.

It is generally my thesis then to insist on the importance of imagination in sex, to insist that the practice of sex, as performed among human beings, be accorded the same deliberate and playful application of fancy, imagination and intelligence as any other significant human activity.

We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences.., generally are more meaningful.

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.