Quotes About Intensity

there were two types of survivors in life: those, like her, who found the requisite strength in having once been loved with great intensity; and those who, having not been loved, learned to thrive on hatred, suspicion, and the meager rewards of revenge. They were at once scornful of the need for human feeling and envious of the capacity for it.

Whatever task you've taken, whatever fight you're facing, you must bring to it nothing less than everything you've got, or otherwise you'll fail for sure and always wonder what might have been if only you had given your all.

By her stare, this woman settled a solemn awe upon my heart, and I was frightened by the degree to which I felt humbled and by the intensity with which I felt loved, and I had to look away.

He gave us the rude number one with lots of emphasis and then came after us.

Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people," Chief Porter said, "but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense.

Intensity. He believes in living with intensity.

and takes the Glock in both hands.

she mainlines books as though they're heroin.

the wake of the shriek, gunfire erupts. One, two, three shots.

black coffee so strong that its smell alone was sufficient to wake anyone in a coma.

because real life was plotted like Tolkien on methamphetamine

One of Dorian Purcell's rules for living a good life was that no matter what you were doing, whether it was building a giant tech company or banging your mistress, breaking a competitor and driving him into ruin or playing pinball, you had to commit to it as if it was everything, as if your very survival depended on it.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping.

I think sometimes we love so deeply, so profoundly, that anything else pales by comparison.

Furious, she grabbed his tie and jerked him into the apartment. "You can come inside," she said.

Now I know how deep my anger can cut…and I wish to hell I didn't.

Maryanne was much too furious to stand still. She paced her living room from one end to the other, her mind spitting and churning. A slow painful death was too good for Nolan Adams.

Time is the fire in which we burn.

What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.

passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image.

The passions may be terrible, but the syllables are a relief.

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it. Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.

Write naked. Write in exile. Write in blood.