Voyeurism Quotes

“Sam laughed, a funny, self-deprecating laugh. "You did read a lot. And spent too much time just inside the kitchen window, where I couldn't see you very well."

"And not enough time mostly naked in front of my bedroom window?" I teased.

Sam turned bright red. "That," he said, "is so not the point of this conversation.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver

“There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?”
― William S. Burroughs, Exterminator!

“Do you ever feel like you’re only ever watching? I ask Declan. Never really participating. Never really doing. Just always watching.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.”
― Jennifer Birkett

“Just don’t stare at my ass, Landemere,” he added.

“I wasn’t staring at your ass,” Arranulf, who had been staring at his ass, said.”
― Andrew Ashling, The Invisible Chains - Part 1: Bonds of Hate

“Most men don't mind if another woman watches. It's the women who are watching who don't want to be seen.”
― John Irving, A Widow for One Year

“I want to spy on all sorts of places, and the box is a portable hole that occurred to me under the circumstances, it being impossible to punch holes throughout the world.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Box Man

“Prostitution is illegal in many places, but porn is not. But what is porn if not sex for money, caught on camera? What the law actually prohibits then is having paid sex in private and not allowing anyone to watch.”
― Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness

“They never saw him drawing pictures of them naked at their antics in his notebook.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. For many centuries, in Christian art, depictions of hell offered both of these elemental satisfactions.”
― Sontag, Susan

“I watched you undress. Shame on you!”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land

“Satan's warming me a throne, that's how long [I've been watching you]. Not a chair, not a seat at the bar. The big guy's got a throne with my name on it.”
― Sarah Winter, Snowbound

“Personally I believe sometimes ugly things happen to good people and sometimes good people do awful things.”
― Scott Parker, Stock-Still

“There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”
― Sontag, Susan

“Voyeurism was a form of control, like mental abuse, like rape, like bullying. It was nothing to do with the physicality of the action, and all to do with the feeling of power it gave the perpetrator, the balancing out of delicate ids and egos.”
― Lisa Jewell, Watching You

“As I watched them I knew I'd probably never be like that.”
― Willy Vlautin, Lean on Pete

“Looking back now, I can only remember a time when the world seemed to have a million eyes, silently opening wherever I went. Most of the time they were camouflaged, like the closed eyes of green lizards in green trees. But then they snapped open—on the bus, in the pharmacy—and I felt the intensity of all that looking, the desire and the desperation.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Before I serve you duck soup, I'll serve you salad. Some people like salad dressing, but not me. I prefer salad undressing, because being a voyeur adds spice to the dinner.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“Mizuko wonders if the GPS is still monitoring their progress. She has the distinct feeling of being watched by something in the darkness. This makes watching the footage and reading the story at the same time a strange experience, as if she can sense me, a menace from the future, following them along the dark road.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“Los ojos son las únicas manos que nos van quedando a unos cuantos, bonita”
― Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit

“He wished he could find a way to sneak into the room with the girls. He just wanted to watch them, as they slept. Watching them would be enough for him. Afterwards, he could go to the bathroom and finish himself off, just to release some tension.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“Women often reason that an unspayed cat is a way to teach the facts of life to their children. That's what they say. Actually, it all boils down to a type of voyeurism, with more interest in breading and birthing than any true interest in children or cats.

The wife of someone we know refused to have their female cat spayed because, she said, "I want my children to watch the miracle of birth." When too many kittens accumulated, her husband took them up to the top of a mountain road near us and abandoned them in the brush.”
― Paul Corey, Do Cats Think?: Notes of a Cat-Watcher

“There is a word for people like you, and that word is audience. An audience comes to a theatre perhaps to see something which if they saw it in real life, they may find offensive… Perhaps you’ve come here this evening, because you want to see something you’ve only done in the privacy of your own homes, something perhaps you wished you’d done in the privacy of your own homes or something that you dreamed about doing in the privacy of your own homes. An audience likes to sit in the dark and to watch other people do it. Well, if you’ve paid your money – good luck to you. However, from this end of the telescope things look somewhat different – you all look very small, and very far away and there’s a lot of you. It’s important to remember that there are more of you than of us. So, if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win.”
― Florian Malzacher

“She returned my kiss in that open-mouthed way that told me she was surrendering to my kinky inclinations.”
― Allen X. Miller, Thump Thump Thump Through the Wall: A Loving Wife Gives Her Husband a Birthday Gift to Remember

“The illusion that he was resting upstairs and
they were sneaking downstairs was shattered. No one could have napped through the racket Cori was making. Dylan had to know they were fucking—even without cameras”
― Kirsten McCurran, Magic Hands: Book Three

“The Pressure Cooker by Stewart Stafford

We arrive at the sweltering park,
And disturb a larcenous squirrel,
Trash can raider with easy spoils,
He scampers away down the back.

Solo lady in the gazebo watches,
An outdoor Mrs. Bates silhouette,
As a tuft of angel hair rolls along,
I give the thirsty baby hydration.

Transfixed by a burst helium balloon,
Rocking itself to the unheard beats,
Arid breeze, now ceiling conductor,
Our squirrel pal returns to spy on us.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“My mother was a very private person; exposure was the final indignity of her murder. Her violent end was illuminated in full detail for a hungry public. The curtains were stripped from her home; anyone could press their nose to the glass. But the beauty of her existence was not reported or filed, was not documented or reenacted on cable television; her light was blocked out by terror. I want to push away that darkness, to travel back through fear and reunite with her as she was before.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“I liked the feeling of spying into the lives of others while they remained ignorant of my presence. I liked to hear, muffled yet nonetheless partially distinct through the door, the things they said when they thought that no-one other than their companion could hear.”
― Yasmine Millett, The Erotic Notebooks

“The spying of course, I told myself, was not malicious, nor something shameful, it was merely a manifestation of the curiosity that everyone felt.”
― Yasmine Millett, The Erotic Notebooks

“Reality TV... The curse of the twenty-first century. Why were people so fascinated by being spectators to other people's lives? Watching people bake cakes, build tree houses, or just invading rich families' living rooms. It was like watching a soap opera without the plot.”
― Adam Rabinowitz, Garage Band