Quotes About Desire

Happiness was still on the other side of a glass door, but at least she could see it through the glass, like a prisoner being visited by a longed-for loved one.

There is a thin line of me, wavering and not strong, that wants to learn the language of beasts and water and night.

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. ... When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities.

What I want does exist if I dare to find it.

Somewhere beween the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere beween fear and sex. Somewere beween God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse.

Passion out of passion's obstacles.

I was hungry, but I was nervous too. You were so new and I didn't want to frighten you away. I didn't want to frighten myself away.

Atlas gazed out, as he always did, into infinite space, wishing he could be part of it, even for one hour.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home.

I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about.

And then I was offered the job of a particle in factory physics. I was offered the job of an electron in an office atom. I was offered the job of a frequency for a radio station. People told me I could easily make it as a ray in a ray gun. What's the matter with you, don't you want to do well? I wanted to be a beach bum and work on my wave function. I have always loved the sea.

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

Can this be true, this simple obvious message, or am I like those shipwrecked mariners who seize an empty bottle and eagerly read out what isn't there? And yet you are there, here, sprung like a genie to ten times your natural size, towering over me, holding me in your arms like mountain sides. Your red hair blazing and you are saying, Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three hundred and I will honour every one.

I am an ambitious writer – I don't see the point of being anything, no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it.

I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life.

He would love her if she were a wolf that tore out his heart. And he wondered what that said about love.

Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over.

Why doesn't she want me? The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can't get warm... She won't be cold. She has the sun inside her.

The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.

When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry.

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.