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Quotes About Desire

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
~ Virginia Woolf
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
~ Virginia Woolf
Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.
~ Virginia Woolf
for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
~ Virginia Woolf
I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.
~ Virginia Woolf
Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we'll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I'll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won't stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.
~ Virginia Woolf
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
~ Virginia Woolf
She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.
~ Virginia Woolf
You wish to be a poet; you wish to be a lover. But the splendid clarity of your intelligence, and the remorseless honestly of your intellect bring you to a halt.
~ Virginia Woolf
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have - positively - a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang - there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes up pretty often.
~ Virginia Woolf
She did not want to move, or to speak. She wanted to rest, to lean, to dream. She felt very tired.
~ Virginia Woolf
Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
~ Virginia Woolf
I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it.
~ Virginia Woolf
Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.
~ Virginia Woolf
Sometimes, one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lusts.
~ Virginia Woolf
Life and a lover
~ Virginia Woolf
Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as the way they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.
~ Virginia Woolf
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.
~ Virginia Woolf
And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
~ Virginia Woolf
I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone.
~ Virginia Woolf
Buy for me from the King's own kennels, the finest elk hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back without delay. For, he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to his books, I have done with men.
~ Virginia Woolf
Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also absolutely beautiful and necessary.
~ Virginia Woolf
He will forget me. He will leave my letters lying about among guns and dogs unanswered. I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting - under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only.
~ Virginia Woolf
How could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there? It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. To want and not to have sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have - to want and want - how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.
~ Virginia Woolf