Quotes About Desire

All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth.

The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not.

Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't.

How impatience men are! All Jack has to do to get everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him; whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate dance where one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time.

Every drop of blood in Lily's veins invited her to happiness.

What's the use—when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.

There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.

But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true.

Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

I am horribly poor—and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money.

Ethan's love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things.

In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it.

There was no sense of guilt in her now, but only a desperate desire to defend her secret from irreverent eyes, and begin life again among people to whom the harsh code of the village was unknown.

Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can't offer you?

one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

Because I - because I want to fell you holding me, he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.

Because I - because I want to feel you holding me, he stammered, and dragged her to her feet.

Cuando estamos separados y deseo verte, cada pensamiento se consume en una gran llama... entonces llegad, y eres tanto más de lo que recordaba, y lo que quiero de ti tanto más que una hora o dos de vez en cuando, con desiertos de sedienta espera en los intervalos, que soy perfectamente capaz de quedarme quieto a tu lado, como ahora, simplemente confiando con tranquilidad en que todo llegará a ser real.

It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth—Undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it "right off." And until she got it the house was uninhabitable.

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience...

Una de las mejores intuiciones del cochero de alquiler fue descubrir que los norteamericanos desean alejarse de sus diversiones aún con mayor prontitud que llegar a ellas.

Nick had secretly wearied, if not of his wife, at least of the life that their marriage compelled him to lead. His passion was not strong enough-had never been strong enough—to outweigh his prejudices, scruples, principles, or whatever one chose to call them. Susy's dignity might go up like tinder in the blaze of her love; but his was made of a less combustible substance.