“As though I had displeased the gods with my erotic hubris, I managed to be the only bisexual girl in the history of colleges who failed to arouse the interest of the campus queers immediately upon setting foot in the dorms.”
— Valentine Glass
“I know my father blamed himself, since he is the one who discovered me pawing through his pornography in the basement as a child. Even then, I marveled at the strangeness of the women in the magazines, their hair feathered in a style I struggled to believe was ever in fashion.”
— Valentine Glass
“People were dumped all the time and their tears did not swallow dry land.”
— Valentine Glass
“If you aren’t ready, you spend your whole life perseverating on that one situation, getting it wrong time and again. I like to think I am a woman who learns her lesson, but the trick is that you can only ever understand your life backwards, but you live it forward.”
— Valentine Glass
“Good and safe” are all I have been during my romantic career, keeping myself virtuous outside of relationships never putting out before I had a commitment and a half dozen dates under my belt.”
— Valentine Glass
“He wants to use my body, to take advantage, and I want to let him. I want to be someone’s one night stand, some blithe slut… I want to allow myself to be like all those women I pretended to look down upon all my life, but whom I secretly envied for having the guts to have their legs spread by strange men in smoky bars.”
— Valentine Glass
“More than that, the thought rattled uncomfortably in my child brain that I would one day become one of them. My body then was sexless. Though I had seen the curves of adults, I couldn’t fathom the chrysalis that would turn my featureless body into something with heft and gravity, curves and the inclination to use them.”
— Valentine Glass
“In retrospect, I didn’t really want to be a slut. What I wanted and needed was a therapist who would consent to fucking me, but I doubted my parents’ insurance would have covered that. I had a lot to figure out for myself and I did that by making poor decisions that summer. If some wise, authoritative adult could simply have explained why I wanted to do these things and then done some with me, I think I would have refrained from most of my sexual misadventures…”
— Valentine Glass