60+ Sex Quotes from Books About Love, Intimacy, and Connection

There’s something quietly thrilling about the way a book captures desire… how a single line can make your pulse skip or spark a memory you weren’t expecting. Some moments feel tender, while others are bold; some take their time, while others rush in with a heat that almost feels whispered.

And suddenly, you’re reminded how powerful words can be! These sex quotes hold that kind of energy, the kind that lingers long after you turn the page.

They celebrate longing, chemistry, closeness, and all the little sparks that make intimacy feel alive. It’s amazing how a sentence can tease, soften, or pull you right into a scene before you even realize it’s happening.

Why do sex quotes from books resonate in loving relationships?

There’s a reason certain lines stay with you long after you close the book… they don’t just describe desire, they let you feel it. The slow build, the tension, the emotion behind every touch or whispered thought—everything blends together in a way that feels almost personal.

Sometimes the quiet moments are the ones that hit the hardest; sometimes a bold sentence makes your whole body pause. And when authors layer vulnerability with longing, it becomes even more powerful.

That mix is what makes love and sex quotes linger in the mind, stirring something warm, curious, and undeniably human.

60+ sex quotes from books about love, intimacy and connection

There’s a special kind of heat that comes from the right line at the right moment… the kind that feels intimate, enticing, and a little bit irresistible. Some quotes tease, some linger, some make you catch your breath without warning.

And isn’t it amazing how just a few words can stir so much feeling?

Here are some quotes about sex that capture that same spark and pull you gently into their world.

• The language of desire in love and relationships

Words have the power to awaken dormant feelings, arouse passions, and illuminate the unspoken mysteries of intimacy. These quotes celebrate the beauty and complexity of desire, offering a poetic glimpse into the art of longing.

1. ‘No wonder people took sex so seriously, or not seriously enough at all. Sex addled your wits and stole your body. It was like being lost and found all at once.’ – Kylie Scott, Lic
2. “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.” – Margaret Atwood, six-word short story
3. It’s so nice/ to wake up in the morning/ all alone/ and not have to tell somebody /you love them /when you don’t love them/anymore.” – Richard Brautigan, “Love Poem”
4. It was really true; there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.” – Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
5. “Either you have the feeling, or you don’t.” – Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up
6. “I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.” – Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
7. “Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it, it turned to dust in my hand.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned
8. “This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot, and then both of you grew sarcastic.” – Lorrie Moore, Like Life
9. “In our deepest moments, we say the most inadequate things.” – Edna O’Brien, A Fanatic Heart
10. “To love someone is to learn the song that is in their heart, and to sing it to them when they have forgotten.” – Arne Garborg
11. “I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Sonnet XXVII”
12. “I’m not sure which is worse, intense feeling, or the absence of it.” – Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
13. “I am stuffing your mouth with your/ promises and watching/ you vomit them out upon my face.” – Anne Sexton, “Killing the Love”
14. “I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.” – Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice

• The many layers of love in meaningful relationships

Love is as tender as it is tumultuous, weaving joy and sorrow together into unforgettable moments. These quotes explore the deep emotional intricacies and contradictions of love and connection.

16. “She wanted him with a quiet intensity, not because she was swept away, but because being close to him felt like returning to something essential.” – Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
17. “Hell, at this point, I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist. We are one long frightening climax.” – Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
18. “Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.” – Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
19. “Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like a volcano and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable you should ever part.” – Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
20. “What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.” – Sylvia Plath, “The Jailer”
21. ‘There is no room in my body for anything but you. My arms love you, my ears adore you, my knees shake with blind affection.’ – William Goldman, The Princess Bride
22. “Sex, they learned, was not the proof of love, but it was often how love made itself known.” — Julian Barnes, Love, etc.
23. “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
24. “Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.” – Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”
25. “Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic – the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.” – George Eliot, Middlemarch
26. “Sex can be one of the most vulnerable experiences between two people, because it involves being emotionally open as much as it involves being physically close.” – Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
27. “You cannot save people, you can only love them.” – Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Two
28. “I love you more than I hate everything else.” – Rainbow Rowell, Landline
29. “In sex, what people are often seeking is not pleasure alone, but reassurance, closeness, and the feeling of being chosen.” – Esther Perel, The State of Affairs
30. “The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.” – Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

• How intimacy strengthens emotional bonds

Intimacy ignites a fire between lovers, creating a profound connection that is both physical and emotional. These quotes capture the sensuality and intensity of being close to someone.

31. “Sex is one of the most honest languages we have. When it is mutual, consensual, and connected, it becomes a form of emotional truth.” – Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight
32. “Folks, I’m telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean, so get yourself a little loving in between.” – Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems
33. “Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth that bite, and the wounds never close.” – Stephen King, The Body
34. “I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.” – Neil Gaiman, American Gods
35. “And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
36. ‘I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.’ – A.S. Byatt, Possession
37. “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
38. “To be beside someone, breathing the same air, was sometimes more intimate than anything else they could do.” – Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
39. “Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.” – Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
40. “Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us, but we can’t strike them all by ourselves.” – Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
41. “Man… heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand… Heats up like an iron. Slowly, over a low heat, like a tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there’s no stopping her.” – Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
42. “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” – William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
43. “We are no guiltier in following the primitive impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.” – Marquis de Sade, Aline et Vacour
44. “…As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.” – Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair
45. “Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.” – James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

• The subtle art of attraction in loving relationships

Seduction is an art where words and gestures become the palette. These quotes highlight the allure and mystery of seduction through literature’s most evocative expressions.

47. “There was a closeness between them that did not rush or demand, but waited – aware of its own gravity.” – David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
48. “Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.” – William Shakespeare, “Much Ado About Nothing”
49. “The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.” – Victor Hugo, “Les Misérables”
50. “He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.” – Virginia Woolf, Orlando
51. “I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute. Just as some people have a secret love for rainstorms, earthquakes, or blackouts, I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it’s a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.” – Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
52. “It surprised her how intimacy could feel less like surrender and more like recognition.” – Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
53. “Love was not separate from desire, but neither was it consumed by it; the two existed in constant negotiation.” – Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
54. “Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or – such is the pleasure they experience – they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them.” – Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
55. “Their closeness was unhurried, shaped more by attention than by action.” – Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
56. “What surprised him was how intimacy was less about what happened, and more about how it changed the space between them afterward.” – Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn
57. “Desire did not feel wild or reckless to her; it felt deliberate, like a choice she was finally ready to make.” – Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
58. “She wanted him with a quiet intensity, not because she was swept away, but because being close to him felt like returning to something essential.” – Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
59. “She understood then that desire was not something separate from her life, but something woven into how she experienced the world.” – Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
60. “He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination – but at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.” – Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
61. “Once desire was acknowledged, it stopped being overwhelming and became something they could carry together.” – Anne Enright, The Gathering
62. “She wanted him not because she was taken, but because she was choosing.” – Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
63. “But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.” – Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
64. “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” – Oscar Wilde
65. “We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.” – Tom Robbins, “Jitterbug Perfume”
66. “Desire moved through her quietly, without spectacle, asking only to be acknowledged.” – Ali Smith, How to Be Both

What literature reveals about love, sex, and connection

Sometimes the lines that stay with us aren’t the loud ones but the soft, lingering ones… the ones that curl around your thoughts long after you’re done reading. It’s beautiful how words can spark warmth, desire, closeness, or even a little self-discovery.

And isn’t it surprising how a single sentence can make you pause, breathe deeper, or feel something you didn’t expect?

These sex quotes remind us that intimacy isn’t just physical; it’s emotional, imaginative, and wonderfully human. Let them linger, surprise you, or inspire a feeling you want to hold onto for a little while longer.

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Rachael Pace Author

Rachael Pace is a noted relationship writer associated with Marriage.com. She provides inspiration, support, and empowerment in the form of motivational articles and essays. Rachael enjoys studying the evolution of loving partnerships... Read more and is passionate about writing on them. She believes that everyone should make room for love in their lives and encourages couples to work on overcoming their challenges together. Read less