Quotes About Desire

but then I think how I grew sick of kissing him. How can you spend your life with a person you're sick of kissing?

Only part you have to apologize for is getting me all horned up and then passing out, but I'll take a rain check

But the truth was that I didn't want to stay in Riley. The pulls of familial love and obligation could not, for the moment, compete with the promise of early-relationship sex. Starlight and beer and our twisting, naked bodies--that was what I wanted, not a seat at a dining room table with two old women eating breaded veal cutlets and Vienna torte.

Other people were so unsuccessful at fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students who I'd known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians, then graduated with boyfriends- to give in to such love represents, for them, a capitulation or a betrayal, yet apparently the pull was so strong that they couldn't resist. That was what I didn't understand, how people made the leap from not mattering in each others' lives to mattering.

If this was all I ever got, it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me, and if this was all I ever got, I'd never stop wanting more of it.

To be with him in this way was an almost intolerable ecstasy.

And now I knew myself to be generous with encouragement only when I either did not want the thing the other person sought of did not believe the person would really get it.

suppressed kind. What I wanted to know (it was useless, and adolescent as well)

There had been certain things I'd wanted badly in my childhood, and instead of getting them, I'd grown up; I did not want them any longer.

Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.

As we enter the path of transformation, the most valuable thing we have working in our favor is our yearning.

If a viewer responds to Botticelli's Venus with an erotic desire, as if she is a pinup, he is actually not appreciating her for her beauty. And if someone enjoys looking at a Gauguin painting of Tahiti while fantasizing about going on vacation there, then they no longer have an aesthetic relation to its beauty.

He was studying his grandmother, as if he was hungry too, but for something not food, hungry in a way that food could never fill.

Poor Melody, he thought again, because she saw love as something that gets you what you want. She didn't understand at all.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

Is it possible to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?

She did not at the bottom believe she ever would have him. She did not believe in herself primarily: doubted whether she could ever be what he would demand of her. Certainly she never saw herself living happily through a lifetime with him. She saw tragedy, sorrow, and sacrifice ahead.

He would come back. She held the keys to his soul. But meanwhile, how he would torture her with his battle against her. She shrank from it.

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

Aren't I enough for you?' she asked. 'No,' he said. 'You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.' (Women in Love)

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis' heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitchgoddess, Success also, if only she would have him.

There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.