Quotes About Desire

In the dense darkness there was a disorderly rustle of silk and a whiff of perfume. Omar held his breath, his body was aroused. He could not help asking with the naïveté of a schoolboy: 'Are you still wearing your veil?' 'The only veil I am wearing is the night.

it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.

You know, a lot of people nowadays believe they're owed a happy ending.

Jean wondered how it might be to go out into the night and howl for sex. The clarity of purpose was appealing. No games.

One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

Need is not transitive, one may need without oneself being needed.

Fatigue overtakes me, and a grief so concentrated I swim in it. A grief that makes my arms heavy. A grief that makes my back slump. A grief that makes me close my eyes. I want to sleep like the unborn and the dead. I want to sleep so deeply that I see him again. I want to confront him. Who were you? I want to say. Why do you talk to me now? I want to shake his inert body. But what's the use? Our losses will never be done with us. They have endless patience.

S]overeign power is nothing if it does not care for the welfare of others, and . . . it is the task of a good ruler to keep his power in check, to resist the passions of unbridled desire and implacable rage, and to realize that, as the dictator Caesar used to say, the recollection of past cruelty is a wretched provision for old age.

She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.

The real tragedy of humankind,' Shealtiel used to say, 'is not that the persecuted and enslaved crave to be liberated and to hold their heads high. No. The worst thing is that the enslaved secretly dream of enslaving their enslavers. The persecuted yearn to be persecutors. The slaves dream of being masters. As in the book of Esther.

There is no chance for other matter in the stomach of a hungry person.

And I surely cannot tell him that I'm no more good for me or for him than I ever was, that I will disappoint and confuse him, that I've been alone my whole life, and that it may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen.

I don't think people can help it. We play with fire and tell ourselves we're just lighting a modest, necessary candle. We know discretion is called for and everything in us cries out to be seen, to spread our feathers.

I wish I'd thrown my arms around Gus's neck and kicked up my back foot or squealed his name or any of the things that a normal woman would do, seeing a man she was fond of, who she thought was dead.

I couldn't ask her anything. There wasn't a single question to which I'd get the answer I wanted.

He wanted to be in the center of the city, in either the oldest or the most modern part, as

This is not true, that nothing bad will happen, and therefore not comforting to me. It leaves me quite alone with reality, but the way he feels is exactly what I want for him.

Real deprivation is not being able to afford the things that are high on your priority list.

And wishes, truly wishes, that she could say the same herself. Because hurting herself would be so much easier.

My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a cigarette in my hand, then my mouth, then my hand again. Holding the cigarette. Tending to the cigarette. Giving the cigarette what it needs. Tapping it in the ashtray. Sucking on it. Then flicking it in the street, like it meant nothing to me.

What I wanted was to blow a hole in the sky, explode a star, let the burning embers scorch me and everything they touched.

I waned him back. I wanted him back so much I couldn't think about anything else. Everywhere I looked was suddenly somewhere Danny wasn't. My hands were empty because Danny wasn't holding them. My room echoed with quiet because Danny wasn't there whispering ridiculous things to make me laugh, or make me shiver. It seemed so right. Danny was mine, I was his, and that wasn't going to work if he was dead. So I would make him not dead, anymore.

After a while, it got too hard not to let him take my hand in the hallway, or snug up behind me at my locker, his chin balanced on the top of head as his hands snaked around my waist. After a while I wanted to share it, to show it off, to let the world see why I was smiling like a complete idiot half the time.

Love like that is what they make movies about. It's the thing you're supposed to want, the answer to every question, the song that you're supposed to sing. But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn't be trusted to hold when you're the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control. Love doesn't break easily, I found. But people do.