Quotes About Desire

I explain to Garth that desire needs a certain degree of aggression—not violence, but an assertive, striving energy. It's what allows you to pursue, to want, to take, and even to sexualize your partner.

O]ur willingness to engage that mystery keeps desire alive. Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery. [...] Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination. We remain interested in our partners; they delight us, and we're drawn to them.

Sexual desire does not obey the laws that maintain peace and contentment between partners. Reason, understanding, compassion, and camaraderie are the handmaidens of a close, harmonious relationship. But sex often evokes unreasoning obsession rather than thoughtful judgment, and selfish desire rather than altruistic consideration. Aggression, objectification, and power all

The one theme that I hear above all else from those who have bitten into the forbidden apple is this: It makes them feel alive.

Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge. "Sex and subterfuge make a delicious cocktail,"7 writes journalist Julia Keller.

By talking about sexual alchemy, I want to clarify that affairs sometimes involve sex and sometimes not, but they are always erotic.

As Marcel Proust understood, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

These stories make a critical point—many affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.

Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness. So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it's a new self.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it.

I have met plenty of men who were the lovers of married women (or married men, for that matter). But I have yet to meet a man who was single and gave his love to another man's wife for thirty years, hoping that she would leave and come and make a family with him.

At their peak, affairs rarely lack imagination. Nor do they lack desire, abundance of attention, romance, and playfulness. Shared dreams, affection, passion, and endless curiosity—all these are natural ingredients found in the adulterous plot.

Being a mistress suited Rose—in the words of novelist Susan Cheever, "I had my freedom and I was someone else's fantasy.

Oscar Wilde wrote, "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is getting what one wants, and the other is not getting it." When our desires are unfulfilled, we

I do believe that the emphasis on egalitarian and respectful sex—purged of any expressions of power, aggression, and transgression—is antithetical to erotic desire for men and women alike.

I suggest that our ability to tolerate our separateness—and the fundamental insecurity it engenders—is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship.

Your lustiness would be an open endorsement for her own ardor.

In the immortal words of Marge Simpson, "Passion is for teenagers and foreigners.

Imagination—that's the key word here. With your affairs, the arousal starts on your flight over there. You don't need the blue pill because what turns you on is the plot, the planning, the carefully chosen clothes. All the anticipation is what fuels the desire. When you come home and the first thing you do is take off your nice clothes and put on old sweatpants, nobody's going to get turned

Imagination—that's the key word here. With your affairs, the arousal starts on your flight over there. You don't need the blue pill because what turns you on is the plot, the planning, the carefully chosen clothes. All the anticipation is what fuels the desire. When you come home and the first thing you do is take off your nice clothes and put on old sweatpants, nobody's going to get turned on.

People love to apply themselves to games, jobs, relationships, politics, to create the illusion of meaning...If I can just heal my shoulder, then I could be a quarterback! If only I could finish this documentary and tell the story of my great-uncle to the world; then I would matter . If I was a movie star, then I would exist . People will light a crack pipe or steal a television just to try and feel that they exist

Sensible is a powerful notion to lay upon children. So much of the world does seem sensible, even when it may impede or even destroy our sense of self-esteem. Sensible looks easy because everyone claims to be doing it. But sensible, really, is some grown-up telling you that you can't have what you want. So

He loved happiness like I love tea.