NudityBooks about Nudity Click this icon to engrave the quote on mugs, bookmarks, t-shirts and much more
There once was a sculptor called Phidias
Who had a distaste for the hideous.
So he sculpt Aphrodite
Without any nightie
Which shocked the ultra-fastidious.
The laws against public nudity make no sense. The idea that Jerry Falwell can go topless while Cindy Crawford cannot is an absolute affront to logic, common sense and the 5000 year human struggle for aesthetic taste.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
Now that nude-beach season is in full, um, swing, taking things off is once again a public matter. It comes with the additional difficulty of hot sand under one's feet and the unavoidable, inescapable truth that gravity always wins.
-Elizabeth Rosner, "Notes on Nude-Beach Season", "Los Angeles Times", August 12, 2006
But for me, being naked out of doors and in the water is one of the best ways I have ever found to restore my sense of blissful innocence. It takes me back to that place of my almost forgotten childhood, where I got to run around undressed without anyone telling me I had to cover up or be embarrassed.
-Elizabeth Rosner, "Notes on Nude-Beach Season", "Los Angeles Times", August 12, 2006
Twenty-five years ago, while an undergraduate at Stanford, I got a job on campus as a lifeguard, deepening a love of swimming and water that has lasted throughout my life. I took the duties seriously and studied the swimmers with professional vigilance, relieved at the end of each day that no emergency rescue had been required. But the greatest challenge of the job was standing poolside in a bathing suit with my body on display.
Work began in the locker room, where I changed into my Speedo and surveyed my reflection, assessing what would be on view for the next few hours. I was plagued by self-criticism. I imagined the swimmers judging my shape, until I made myself remember that I was there to guard their lives, not their fantasies. Later I performed my variation of the same ablutions everyone else did, showering and hair washing, the application of lotion and makeup -- preparations for re-entering the other world of walking upright on solid land.
-John Updike, In Hugging the Shore (1983). “Going Barefoot,” On the Vineyard (1980)
A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist--nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
Books about Nudity
Click this icon to engrave the quote on mugs, bookmarks, t-shirts and much more
