Quotes About Passion

The only happy people I know are the ones who are working well at something they consider important. ABRAHAM MASLOW

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

Lou asked point-blank, Can love last? (Rural people get to philosophizing, and will say anything.) —Oh, darling! No, not that heart-thumping passion. Give that eighteen months. But it's replaced by something even better. Lou waited. —Lovers!

Books swept me away, one after the other, this way and that; I made endless vows according to their lights, for I believed them.

I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old;

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burned out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.

When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.

Quand j'étais enfant, le luxe c'était pour moi les manteaux de fourrure et les villas au bord de la mer. Plus tard, j'ai cru que c'était de mener une vie d'intellectuel. Il me semble maintenant que c'est aussi de pouvoir vivre une passion pour un homme ou une femme

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

Photography is not something you retire from.

For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.

I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.

Between a mother's eyes and her son's face, there is not air. There is something invisible and invincible. Even though—or because—he will go out into the world, she will never lose her passion to protect him.

She is so beautiful. My Rose. Finer than sculpture, softer than sand. Rose, I'm kissing you now. Oh God, I have to kiss her. I will die if I don't kiss her, I know that now. It is a fact. I will die. It will kill me.

Then she kissed me in that way that makes me hate time.

It's a self-portrait and the artist is in love.

He loved her way: acting casual, working like a Trojan, singing like an angel. Not angelically. The voice of an angel. Winged, lethal, close to the sun.

el deseo nos mantiene vivos. Alimenta nuestra alma.

Las personas que no sienten ninguna emoción sufren de frialdad emocional, de atrofia interior. De ellas no brota ni una brizna de vitalidad, y tampoco dinamismo alguno.

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck.

There is no halfway. You don't, it turns out, sell out a little bit. Maybe you thought you were just going to show a little ankle – okay, maybe a little calf, too – but in the end, you're taking on the whole front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers on a dirty shag carpet.