Love & Passion Quote by James Dickey

Dickey’s line refuses the Hallmark vocabulary of sex and swaps in a darker, more novelistic pair of words: intimacy and complicity. Intimacy is expected; complicity is the tell. It smuggles in the idea that sex isn’t just closeness, it’s an agreement - sometimes tacit, sometimes thrillingly explicit - to step outside the ordinary rules. That’s the subtext: desire as a private conspiracy, a shared risk, a mutual “we know what this means,” even when no one says it.

The phrasing does quiet work. “True feeling” sets up a corrective, as if Dickey is pushing back against the easy cultural story that sex is mainly release, romance, or status. “Deep” repeats like a pulse, insisting that the point isn’t technique or spectacle but immersion: the sense of being in something together. Then “above all” elevates complicity to the core emotion, not a side effect. Complicity can be tender - the comfort of being fully seen - but it’s also morally charged. It hints at secrecy, transgression, the possibility of betrayal, the way sex can bind two people into a unit that’s briefly more important than spouses, friends, reputations, even their own stated values.

Coming from a novelist with Dickey’s era and temperament, the context matters: postwar masculinity, Southern codes, and a literary tradition fascinated by what people do when civilization’s varnish thins. He’s not sanitizing sex; he’s diagnosing it as a pact that can console, compromise, or corrupt - sometimes all at once.