Quotes About Desire

Christianity has spiritualised the egoism of Judaism into subjectivity (though … this subjectivity is again expressed as pure egoism), has changed the desire for earthly happiness, the goal of the Israelite religion, into the longing for heavenly bliss, which is the goal of Christianity.

God as an object of thought … is always a remote being; the relation … is an abstract one, … So long as we have not met a being face to face, we are always in doubt whether he is really such as we imagine him; … Christ … is the … certainty that God is what the soul desires and needs him to be. … [O]nly in Christ is the last wish of religion realised, … [W]hat god is in essence, … Christ is in actual appearance.

In Lucretius, sexual desire is considered real and genuine, whereas love is illusory. Venus, the goddess who represents the power of sexual desire, is the font of love. She merely mocks lovers with mental images. Try as they might, lovers cannot satisfy themselves by gazing nor by rubbing against one another because the madness of love will always return; hence Lucretius' prescription to flee the mental images, that is, to ward off what feeds love, turning the mind elsewhere.

Love demands all, and has a right to all.

The desire for an increase of wealth can be satisfied through exchange, which is the only method possible in a capitalist economy, or by violence and petition as in a militarist society, where the strong acquire by force, the weak by petitioning.

As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had. My mother-mythic, imaginary-was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once. If only I'd had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem; if only I'd had her , she would have been the cure for everything that ever had gone wrong in my life.

What Trixie wanted, most of all, what she couldn't have - to go back to being the kind of girl who worried about things like science tests and whether any college would admit her, instead of being the kind of girl everyone worried about.

She's not like anyone I've ever seen before. When I'm not with her, I want to be. And when she opens the book and I see her face, I can barely remember what I'm supposed to say, much less how to speak at all. I think I might be in love with her.

There was a look in their eyes, sometimes . . . They weren't dreading the trigger being pulled, even if the gun was already pointed at them. It was as if they ran toward it. I could not fathom this, at first. How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.

After sticking out life, I hope it's whatever you want it to be.

A saguaro can fall for a snowman but where would they set up house?

And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.

Well, a love story, that's no story at all. People don't want a happy ending. They want conflict. They want the heroine to fall for man she can never have.

Sometimes you can't tell how consuming love is until you can see its absence

I want her to be safe. I want her to be mine.

I feel like I've been starving for decades and he's a feast.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies. Like: The fifth time's the charms. Like: Things between Zoe and me will be better once the baby's born. Like: One sip isn't going to kill me.

Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure-a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter-but it was also a room from which there really wasn't an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn't want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.

I kept hoping, silently, that you would want to save her like you hadn't been able to save yourself.

She touched him and found that even something as innocent as the lacing of their fingers could raise all the hairs on the back of her neck and make her blood beat faster.

Given my mother's experience with romance, I shouldn't even care - but there's a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn't near you.

When he smiles at me, I'm lost

It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

Hunger, she often tells me, has nothing to do with the belly and everything to do with the mind.