Love & Passion Quote by John Waters

Waters turns gratitude into a needle: a pious-sounding “I thank God” that immediately detonates into blasphemous punchline. The joke isn’t just that Catholic guilt lingers; it’s that he wants it to. “Dirty” here is less a moral verdict than an aesthetic fuel source, a way to keep sex charged with danger, comedy, and transgression instead of sanding it down into hygienic self-help language. He’s mocking the Church’s obsession with policing bodies while also admitting its psychological machinery works: shame is sticky, and sticky makes for better stories.

The line lands because it’s a paradox dressed as confession. If sex is “always” dirty, then desire never gets fully domesticated by adulthood, therapy, or progressive enlightenment. Waters is staking out a worldview where taboo is not merely oppressive but theatrically productive. That’s classic Waters: taking the very institutions meant to civilize people and repurposing their repressions into camp spectacle. Catholicism becomes a kind of origin myth for his cinema, which thrives on bad taste, erotic panic, and the pleasure of offending polite society.

There’s also a sly critique of cultural “sex positivity” when it hardens into its own morality. Waters isn’t arguing for ignorance or harm; he’s defending ambivalence, the messy mix of arousal and embarrassment that actually reflects how many people feel. The subtext: we don’t just inherit religion’s rules, we inherit its drama, and Waters - America’s patron saint of filth - refuses to give up the drama.