Quotes About Desire

Recovering alcoholics often talk about drinking "the way they wanted to" when they were alone, drinking without the feeling of social restraint they might have had at a party or in a restaurant. There's something almost childlike about the need, and about the language we use to describe it: wanting our bottles, wanting to crawl into that dark room in our minds and curl up and be alone with our object of security.

Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?

But isn't this what Americans do best, the pursuit of happiness reconfigured as the pursuit of stuff, the diet, the toys, the boys, the magic bullet

These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake —add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem — and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow... The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it's something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled.

tend to side with the Monks of New Skete on the question of the canine desire to please: dogs, they say, care a lot less about pleasing humans than they care about pleasing themselves; if acting in a way that pleases you means something good will happen to them—they'll get a biscuit, a reward, a pat on the back—they're likely to be motivated to carry out the task, but their agenda is not necessarily driven by the pure and selfless wish to make you happy.

Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind

The dog's agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. "I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied.

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.

But then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us.

Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.

For a long time, when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is simple: alcohol makes everything better, until it makes everything worse.

So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary.

Anyone who's ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some undefinable tide has turned forever and you can't go back. You need it; it's a central part of who you are.

Love is the worst poison. Love has driven more men to murder than hate or greed ever did. And for love there is no known antidote.

As long as she would have him, the rest of the world could go hang.

He didn't want to run the other way when he saw Miss Bennet, as vexing as she was. He wanted to best her, to leave her speechless; he wanted to hear her confess that she was wrong and he was right, about anything at all. And most worrisome of all, he wanted to kiss her senseless when she did so. Maybe even before. He must be cracked in the head.

Of course, she'd also heard that rakes enjoyed the chase, the thrill of pursuing a reluctant woman, and she'd just scotched any prospect of that. But when she thought of how long it would take to entice Liam into wanting her, then pursuing her, pretending reluctance, before finally succumbing… Who had time for that? She wanted to know now.

He leaned forward. "Bathsheba," he said in the soft Scottish drawl that always caused unwarranted tremors to shiver through her. "Are you trying to seduce me?" Yes. She would die before saying it out loud. "Would it be faster to try to hire you?" Liam laughed. "You couldn't afford me, love.

He took another deep breath as she laughed, and the vibrations rippled through her body into his. 'I could stay here forever,'he added, almost to himself, as he brushed aside her hair to nuzzle the back of her neck. She raised her head and gave him a sultry look. 'Forever! How many wicked plans do you have?' 'You have no idea,' he murmured, easing away from her. He reached around and began untying her stays.

So much for fearing a shy, paralyzed virgin; she might be innocent, but Eliza had pressed against him and kissed him back until he completely forgot that he was pursuing her because of her father's manipulations. That thought cooled his blood somewhat. Edward Cross wanted him to court and marry his daughter, didn't he? Hugh smiled grimly. Cross was about to get exactly what he wanted. And so was he. Not only Cross's money, but Eliza herself.

Her stomach had fluttered when he asked so persistently, even threatening to persuade her. If he'd tried to kiss her to persuade her . . . curse him, it would have worked.

He looks like a bear and I don't know how any woman could be intimate with him if she weren't allowed to whip him.

I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things—the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos—are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.

From that time forward it has been hard for me not to think of literature as created primarily to give writers the drinks they want.