Quotes About Desire

It's a funny thing how everyone wants to go to the bottom of the world.

I wish I was away in Ingo Far across the briny sea Sailing over deepest waters Where neither care nor worry trouble me.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin. But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?

The fire melts into velvety blackness. There are stars in the blackness, and I want to count them one by one, but they're dancing too fast...

O Lyric Love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire! Robert Browning

Romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly.

People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Romantic love is not an emotion. … It's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind.

We need food. We need water. We need warmth. And the lover feels he/she needs the beloved. Plato had it right over two thousand years ago. The god of love "lives in a state of need."41

Sometimes our passion is our ruin.

The thing about longing is this: It is easy to feel equal to wanting. It is rare to feel equal to having.

I can feel the heat blossoms on your skin.

I just stuffed it into the container of my dream.

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.

always meant to run away someday.

Like oceans, we ebb and flow and are in constant motion. We have a deep desire to keep things as they are, and a contradictory desire to expand beyond our current limits. Times of relative equilibrium allow us to build the strength we need for times of movement. It can be difficult for us to know which stage we are in and whether we are moving forward at all. But underneath our seemingly individual current, we are ultimately being pulled forward toward a connection with the greater whole.

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.

And I was sure it was the drink that irrigated White's self-sabotage, for it is the common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.

Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.

I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk's eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.

And I was sure that it was the drink that irrigated White's constant self-sabotage, for it is a common trait of alcoholics to make plans and promises, to oneself, to others, fervently, sincerely, and in hope of redemption. Promises that are broken, again and again, through fear, through loss of nerve, through any number of things that hide that deep desire, at heart, to obliterate one's broken self.