Quotes About Desire

I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don't even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try.

What she couldn't stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.

but personally, he could never be anywhere without sooner or later wanting to go somewhere else... Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings.

I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realize that it was not a product of will but of it's opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion.

You have to forget about the boys,' he said. 'For a while at least... They'll devour you... They can't help it. It's in their nature. They'll take it all until there's nothing left.

I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body.

I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards

why I did things I didn't want to do and couldn't do what I wanted.

because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.

To be led and then discarded by one's urges...

a feeling of impulses under continual restraint.

Is it wrong to want things that you can't give me?

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.

Tive a sensação de que poderia nadar quilômetros, até o alto-mar; um desejo de liberdade, um impulso de me mover me puxava como se fosse um fio amarrado no meu peito. Era um impulso que eu conhecia bem, e havia aprendido que não era o chamado de um mundo maior, como eu antes acreditava que fosse. Era simplesmente um desejo de escapar do que eu tinha. O fio não conduzia a lugar nenhum exceto a vastidões de anonimato que não paravam de crescer.

I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven't managed to liberate my smallest toe. I

find it difficult to answer my own needs. The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without.

I am a good student and have been unable to prevent myself from learning his taste very thoroughly, to the extent that I have come to know what he wants before he even wants it himself, and in the matter of women I have become positively prophetic, almost to the extent that I see them with his eyes and feel his own desire for them.

More – life,' he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. 'And more affection,' he added, after a pause. 'I wanted more affection.

the idea of L ever coming to where I was and looking at it through his own eyes, which would have taken that consummation to a point of finality and given me – or so I believed – a version of the freedom I had wanted my whole life.

My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was stored inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator

What kind of love was this, that needed the love object domesticated and locked up? And if there was love being handed out, why wasn't she getting any?