Quotes About Desire

Perhaps 'love' had always been for me an ignis fatuus.

She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.

What do you want for Christmas?' 'A loaded revolver.

Being in love has its own self-certifying universality, it informs and glorifies the world with an energy which, like a drug, becomes a necessity of consciousness. Without it, the scene is dark, without that throbbing communication, dead. A mad state, perhaps an undesirable one, inimical to justice, benevolence, common sense. But, for its slaves, it justifies itself as, for the ordinary unsaintly man, nothing else ever does.

Ludens thought, why can't I do that, why can't I just ask a woman to hold my hand, why can't I ask Franca to!

He wanted to take her in his arms, he wanted to be utterly revealed to her, he wanted her to understand.

One knows what being in love is like and it is a very terrible thing.

She did not really mind not altogether enjoying it in bed.

But my wants are huge, my desires are rapacious, I want love, I want the splendour and violence of love, and I want it now, I want someone of my own.

A great sword pierced Sefton's heart. She too had loved Lucas with her own kind of deep secret love, and it seemed to her in this moment that, if he had asked her, she would have gone with him anywhere.

Eros and Thanatos: a false pair and a true pair.

The absence of the loved person is so absolute.

He had lived throughout upon magic, upon romantic love in its fullest sense, and this magic, now that she was gone, seemed sometimes likely to kill him.

Although he longed to see Louise, and to see Aleph, he increasingly lacked the will to go.

Terrible sadness, dread, an agonizing desire for happiness swelled in his heart.

Filthy lucre! Filthy lucre!" I could hear Sammy saying, with the voice of a man cursing the woman he has ruined.

She felt above all, as a sort of categorical imperative, the desire to set Hannah free, to smash up all her eerie magical surroundings, to let the fresh air in at last; even if the result should be some dreadful suffering.

By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.

You have sometimes thought of going back? Yes, I have, but only in a fantasy way.

There were many people . . . who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls. Work, as it now is, . . . can rarely offer satisfaction to the half-contemplative.

There were many people, she said, and Michael was but too ready to credit her since he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

This was everything that I wanted to be done with, the relaxed banality of life without goals.

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.

But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his cleverness a ghost, he knew where it was he wanted to lay his head.