Quotes About Desire

The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her. —BARON CORVO

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by "tolerantly amused eyes" was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of

All you girls get married, you have no strength of mind at all. I really do feel that all this sex is overrated, don't you?' 'I don't know,' said Martha humorously, 'I haven't tried yet.' But he would not accept the humour. He pressed her arm urgently, and looked down into her face and insisted, 'Well, don't you think so? All you girls want to be made love to, and really…' His face faded in disgust.

When a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her - of emotional and sexual responses that grows in its own laws, its own logic.

I'd rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I'm not saying I'm choosing failure. I mean, one doesn't choose failure, does one? I know what I don't want, but not what I do want.

descubrir que hemos logrado de un modo tan fácil algo tantas veces deseado es decepcionante. Es como si no lo hubiera estado intentando. Conseguir algo que uno quiere por pura casualidad, no, no hay en ello placer, ni sensación de éxito.

I wanted her to to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. (107)

The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)

I would imagine being tied up and put in a haystack while someone put the dry, stale straw ablaze. I would picture it perfectly while rocking on my hand. The daydream was about struggling to get free while the fire burned hotter and closer. I am not sure if I came when the fire reached me or after I had imagined escaping it. But I came. I orgasmed on my hand to the dream of fire.

We all nourish truth with our tongues not in sour-batter words that never take shape nor line-driven stories bent to skirt the edge of our great exhaustion, desire, and doubt. We all use simply the words of our own lives to say what we really want, to lie spent on our lovers, put teeth to all we hate, to strain the juice of our history between what has been allowed and what has always been denied, the active desire to take hold of the root.

Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is to learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you. Dorothy Allison, "Mama" Trash

We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn't know how to get it back.

It is so hard to be a girl and want what you have never had. To be a child and want what you cannot imagine. To look at women and think, Nobody else, nobody else has ever wanted to do what I want to do. Hard to be innocent, believing yourself evil. Hard to think no one else in the history of the world wants to do this. Hard to find out that they do, but not with you. Or not in quite the way you want them to do it.

She blushed. I love it when women blush, especially those big butch girls who know you want them. And I wanted her. I did. I wanted her. But she was a difficult woman, wouldn't let me give her a backrub, read her palm, or sew up the tear in her jeans—all those ritual techniques Southern femmes have employed in the seduction of innocent butch girls.

We wanted a feminist revolution. I wanted it like a lover. I wanted it like justice.

Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.

there are no valid generalizations to be made about sex and women's lives except for the central fact that we are all hungry for the power of desire and we are all terribly afraid.

Moreover, just as I was terrified of addressing my own racism, so, too, other women were afraid of stepping into the deep and messy waters of class and sexual desire. If we get into this, what might we lose? If we expose this, what might our enemies do with it? And what might it mean? Will we have to throw out all the theory we have built with such pain and struggle? Will we have to start over? How are we going to try to make each other safe while we work it through?

The holy act of sex, my sex, done in your name, done for the only, the best reason. Because we want it.

believe that sexual desire is a powerful emotion and a healthy one. I'm pretty sure that when anyone acknowledges and acts on their desire, it does us all some good—even if only by giving other people permission to act on their desire—that it is sexual repression that warps desire and hurts people.

Sex then, no matter how dangerous. Sex then, no matter what the cost. Never again, I promised, would I let anyone persuade me to rob myself.

wanted an operation, not the boy-making kind, but a lever in the flesh, one I could permanently switch to off. I longed for immunity, distance, relief—not the end of all sex, but the end of the need, and more than the flesh, the end of the need for love

I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be.

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye