“Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba
Source: Leaves of Grass
Last Men in London (1932)
“Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba
Source: Leaves of Grass
Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
“This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.”
Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director
From the sixth book, "The Book of the Lover"
The Pillow Book
Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist
We the People interview (1996)
Context: Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us. This relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, "I want to have an interface with you," I say, "please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror." Anybody who says, "I want to communicate with you," I say, "Can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."
“Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine.”
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist
The Signal-Man http://www.charles-dickens.org/three-ghost-stories-the-signal-man/ebook-page-04.asp (1866)
Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist
"Talking," in A Lover's Discourse (1977)