Quotes About Desire

Peace comes when we see our reflection in the face of God and let go of the desire to be someone else.

The belief that freedom is an all-or-nothing phenomenon – that we have it either all the time or none of the time – blinds us to the fact that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won and lost, and its loss is gradual. Unless the will is constantly exercised, it atrophies and dies. We then become objects, not subjects, swept along by tides of fashion, or the caprice of desire, or the passion that becomes an obsession.

We have become lonely selves in search of purely personal fulfilment. But that surely must be wrong. Life alone is only half a life. One spent pursuing the satisfaction of desire is less than satisfying and never all we desire. So it is worth reminding ourselves that there is such a thing as ethics, and it belongs to the life we live together and the goods we share – the goods that only exist in virtue of being shared.

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything

She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything

I missed you even when I was with you. That's been my problem. I miss what I already have, and I surround myself with things that are missing.

Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.

Nothing could keep me from you. Nothing in life or Death...

Like the rest of the team, neither of us had wanted to do anything much, other than eat and sleep and enjoy the pure mechanics of being alive. But now he was here.

However, try as he might, nothing Nathaniel summoned had the combination of initiative, power, and obedience that he required. More than once, in fact, he was surprised to find himself thinking almost wistfully of his first servant. But he had resolved not to summon Bartimeaus again.

Vanity is a natural object of temptation to a woman.

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.

Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.

I told him… that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst.

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

I look at her, wondering what it is about her that makes me want to simultaneously devote my life to her and get as far away from her as I can possibly get.

Driving a Porsche is like fucking a model," he says, and he would know. "It will never feel as good as it looks.

Driving a Porsche is like fucking a model. It will never feel as good as it looks.

Good sex requires many different things, but in most cases, efficiency isn't one of them. - Judd Foxman

Being an official divorce brought late-night channel-surfing up to a staggering new level of depressing. I just wanted to belong to someone already.

There was a terminal narrative. It was a story until it stopped being a story and until then they kept wanting to know. Give up... Surrender your need for the detail; there is only one way this is going to end.