Quotes About Desire

my sense of exaltation was due not only to admiration of the autumn tints but to a bodily desire. Ample source of a joy which the heart feels at first without being conscious of its cause, without understanding that it results from no external impulse!

No doubt my love for Albertine was not the most impoverished of those to which the want of will-power can reduce us, since it was not entirely platonic; she did give me physical pleasures, and she was also intelligent. But all that was secondary. What stayed in my mind was not something intelligent she might have said, but some remark that aroused my suspicion about her actions.

There must be something inaccessible in what we love, something to pursue; we love only what we do not possess, and soon I began once more to realize that I did not possess Albertine.

she believed came from her admirer but which was due in effect to the utter impossibility of finding pleasure when one spends all one's time looking for it.

I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she preferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.

Et chaque fois la lâcheté qui nous détourne de toute tâche difficile, de toute oeuvre importante, m'a conseillé de laisser cela, de boire mon thé en pensant simplement à mes ennuis d'aujourd'hui, à mes désirs de demain qui se laissent remâcher sans peine.

Having had time to come, Albertine must have arrived. I went straight to Françoise: "Is Mlle Albertine here?" "No one has come." Good God, did that mean that no one would be coming? I was in torment, Albertine's visit now seeming all the more desirable for being less certain.

the object of her most trivial thoughts, and the goal of her most important actions

E com essa intermitente grosseria que lhe voltava logo que ele não mais sofria e que rebaixava o nível de seu caráter moral, exclamou consigo mesmo: "E dizer que eu estraguei anos inteiros de minha vida, que desejei a morte, que tive o meu maior amor, por uma mulher que não me agradava, que não era o meu tipo!".

the past having often thought with terror that one day he would cease to be in love with Odette, he had promised himself to be vigilant and, as soon as he felt his love was beginning to leave him, to cling to it, to hold it back. But now to the weakening of his love there corresponded a simultaneous weakening of his desire to remain in love. For one cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.

For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture,

there is in the sadist — good as he may be, indeed the better he is — a thirst for evil that malefactors cannot satisfy.

even while deceiving him, she loved him. How often we sacrifice the fulfillment of a possible happiness to our impatience for an immediate pleasure!

Our love of life is only an old connexion of which we do not know how to rid ourself. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death which severs it will cure us of the desire for immortality.

28. Comment j'aimerais mourir. — Meilleur et aimé. 29. État présent de mon

But this was not the opinion that I would instinctively have formed when I heard Albertine say: "In any case, whether he's devoted or not, I sincerely hope I shall never see him again, since he's made us quarrel. We must never quarrel again. It isn't nice." I felt, since she had seemed to desire Saint-Loup, almost cured for the time being of the idea that she cared for women, which I had supposed to be incurable.

Often, when, in the hall of the casino, two girls felt desire for each other, there was produced something like a phenomenon of light, a sort of trail of phosphorescence leading from one to the other.

But above all my anguish was incomparably stronger this time, for many reasons, of which the most important was not perhaps that I had never tasted sensual pleasure with Mme de Guermantes or with Gilberte, but that since I did not see them every hour of every day and had no opportunity, and consequently experienced no need, to do so, my love for them lacked the all-powerful element of Habit.

When you heard anyone in the middle of a talk which was being deliberately kept off the Affair announce furtively some piece of political news, generally false but always devoutly to be wished, you could induce from the nature of his predictions where his heart lay.

Pois desde que se está enamorado, todos os pequenos privilégios desconhecidos que a gente possui, desejaria poder divulgá-los à mulher a quem ama, como fazem na vida os deserdados e os importunos. Sentimos que ela os ignore, procuramos consolar-nos dizendo conosco mesmos que, justamente porque não são jamais visíveis, talvez ela acrescente à ideia que tem de nós essa possibilidade de vantagens desconhecidas.

Let us simply recall the wish to appear natural and forthcoming, the instinctive movement to conceal a secret lovers' meeting, a mixture of modesty and ostentation, the need to speak of what is so pleasant to ourselves and to show that we are loved, a partial understanding of what the other person already knows, or guesses, which, outrunning or falling short of his understanding, constantly over- or under-estimates it, the involuntary drive to take risks or to cut one's losses.

love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come)?

We dream a great deal of paradise, or, rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!