Ritual Purity

Famous quotes containing the words ritual and/or purity:

“Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequences of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)

“Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)