quotations about nudity
Here is nudity, you say (at least this is how I'm reading it right now), nudity which is not like a knife and not like a wound. Exposed nudity, vulnerable, a little ashamed and merciful. Like yours exactly, the imperfect nudity of a woman my age. Look, you tell me my nudity is a little unsure of itself, my body is being assisted along by all kinds of little tricks to conceal its defects--but is willing to immediately give up those tricks for whoever wishes to look upon it with an appreciative eye. Here is nudity that uses clothes (you keep saying?), blouses, dresses, bras, belts, in the same way people use words, "their" words, but you can come and touch, feel it; here is nudity that can also heal.
DAVID GROSSMAN
Be My Knife: A Novel
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Nudity quickly becomes unremarkable when generally practiced.
MARTHA NUSSBAUM
Hiding from Humanity
I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in a swing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, to hang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked from the waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picture for fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, I don't think the old men they've got here can see well enough to notice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, so she's in the closet with my gallstones.
FANNIE FLAGG
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
I thoroughly enjoy seeing a beautifully proportioned nude male. So did Michelangelo and Rodin. But if the male is blubbery, he should keep his beer barrel to himself and not be a portly polluter.
JUNE LOCKHART
The Palm Beach Post, October 5, 1972
The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
Art disguised as nudity is viable (Genet), but nudity disguised as art becomes at best a joke (Charlotte Moorman), at worst a bore (Che!).
NED ROREM
Critical Affairs: A Composer's Journal
What shows itself in erotic nudity is less something revealed as it is treason against a secret; it is the profanation of that which is essentially hidden and mysterious.
RAOUL MOATI
Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity
The terrible poetry of human nudity, I understand it at last, I who tremble for the first time in trying to read it with blasé eyes.
RACHILDE
Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel
What nudity therefore reveals is its own impudence; what is shown in it is not so much what is secret, as the betrayal of the secret, which is to say profanation itself.
RAOUL MOATI
Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity
Nudity is an essential part of all primitive agricultural rites ... By unveiling the body, and especially the sexual organs, women more effectually represented the goddess of fertility, and more effectually as her representatives, or through their own powers, magically conveyed fertility to the fields.
JOHN ARNOTT MACCULLOCH
The Religion of the Ancient Celts
The nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The Reprieve
I find people better looking without clothes than with clothes. You can go to a gym and go to a steam room and you see someone and think, He's really handsome. Then he puts on his clothes. Some weird pants. A thumb ring. Some weird socks. And it's gone!
TOM FORD
Vanity Fair, March 2006
To be naked is to be without disguises.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
Women who use public nudity for social commentary, art and protest are myth-busting along many dimensions: active, not passive; strong not vulnerable; together, not isolated; public, not private; and, usually, angry, not alluring. The threat that female toplessness and self-articulated nudity poses is culturally defined and can be culturally redefined so that people recognize that the offense to morality is misogyny, not nudity.
SORAYA CHEMALY
"Why Female Nudity Isn't Obscene, But Is Threatening to a Sexist Status Quo", Huffington Post, June 22, 2014
Why is exposing the world to non-sexualized female nudity important? The real question about female nudity isn't why anyone would want to show or see women's breasts if they're not titillating. The real question is about who has the right to say what they're for, where and when they can be seen and by whom. That's about power.
SORAYA CHEMALY
"Why Female Nudity Isn't Obscene, But Is Threatening to a Sexist Status Quo", Huffington Post, June 22, 2014
In fact, research suggests that children who have seen their parents nude do not grow up to be emotionally scarred, but instead are more likely to be accepting of their own bodies and comfortable with their own sexuality.
HOLLY ROBINSON
"The Naked Truth on Family Nudity", American Baby, December 2004
Religious strictures are often the source of attitudes toward nudity. Society urges the wearing of clothing partially as a means of controlling the powerful sexual urges that are feared will be released by nudity, causing chaotic behavior.
PATRICIA GARFIELD
The Universal Dream Key
A man who can't eat dinner naked on a leather couch is little better than a slave.
JOSH OZERSKY
Eat Like a Man
The experience of nudity does not refer to a hidden existent but to that which does not belong to the register of possible, present existents: Erotic profanation is a nocturnal event. What manifests in the erotic night is nothing less than that which, because it remains secret, beyond any presence, real or possible, unfolds itself in the mode of that which is not yet. Erotic nudity uncovers the clandestine, which refuses to give itself, and it is in this way that nudity is profanation, that is, the paradoxical coincidence of the hidden and the discovered, of the secret that remains hidden despite being discovered.
RAOUL MOATI
Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity