Quotes About Desire

But when we are able to see the extent of our own fears and desires, there is something in us, recognized by both Buddha and Freud, which is able to break free.

Amy: Hey, Paisley, Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't? Bracewell: What? Amy: Hurts, doesn't it? But kind of a good hurt.

Also I didn't have 20/20 vision which you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

He'd tried celibacy. The only problem was the lack of sex.

He was an arsehole, but, God, she looked at Richard sometimes, the racing bike, the way he did the crossword in pencil first. There were evenings when she wanted Dad to ride in off the plains, all dust and sweat and tumbleweed, kick open the saloon doors and stick some bullet holes in those fucking art books.

He hated it as if he were about to love it—unforgivingly, irrationally, sadly.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war.

They would go about town sighing and talking to themselves. I love you, they would say to the imagined beloved, though it might have appeared to someone else that they were speaking to a snow shovel or an egg crate.

The way she looked at him, and he knew it, it was clear that she was seeking someone she could love, someone who would love her as if she were once again a girl and the world was young. There was no question that he was capable of such a thing. She could see it in his face and read it in his every expression.

He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.

He wanted more than anything in the world to embrace her. But it seemed out of the question. Then she turned to him and stretched out her arms. And he went to her as if he had been born for it.

Better to have a font of money in middle age than when you're young. Middle age is the time when you'll need it and appreciate it. I'll never appreciate it. I've been trained out of it. I don't want money. I want much more. I want what rarely happens. I want what people are afraid even to imagine. Like what? Resurrection, redemption, love.

Papa, Alessandro said, his eyes closing. She swims nude in the sea. She carries a pistol. And she wears perfume that makes me dizzy. Sometimes I go to the garden gate and smell the handle, because, when she touches it, the perfume stays.

I don't want an ambulance. I want you to sit down and shut up. But Signore, an ambulance could take you to a hospital. They could help you. I don't want to die in a hospital. You wouldn't! You'd live! Alessandro closed one eye. I don't want to be alive in a hospital, either.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out of the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

Having read Lermontov and other Russians, and having stayed up until four in the morning, Alessandro found himself making declarations such as, All I desire is one night with you, after which I will quickly cause myself to be disemboweled.

the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

But when we believe that only what we want holds the gold, then we find ourselves easily depressed by what we lack. Then we are pained by what we perceive as the difference between here and there, between what we have and what we need.

At the root of desperate poverty, human trafficking, political violence and global inequity is a sense of scarcity and competition fueled by greed—the inordinate desire to possess wealth, goods or objects of abstract value far beyond the dictates of basic survival or comfort.

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.