Quotes About Desire

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Life Stories: Why hunger for these? One, it fits a hunger. Maybe it is more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge of the life, no matter who lived it...

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.

No one ever told you greed and hunger are not the same.

Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will suffer, later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that's a sacrilege.

She's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets.

Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something.

So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex. "Don't even think about it," he tells himself. Sex is like drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.

She's been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted but quickly finished.

I see what he's after. He is a collector. He thinks all he has to do is give me an apple, and then he can collect me.

But it's love that does us in.

He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.

It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam.

Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

We talked about our real mothers and how we wanted to know who they'd been. Perhaps we ought not to have shared so much, but it was very comforting. "I wish I had a sister," she said to me one day. "And if I did, that person would be you.

all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money

What he really wanted was revenge. But against whom, and for what? Even if he had the energy for it, even if he could focus and aim, such a thing would be less than useless.

she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don't want to kill the bodies of other women.

I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment - my distaste, my suffering even - would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not experience sexual pleasure this was all to the good, because then she would not be liable to wander off seeking it elsewhere.

Death makes me hungry. Maybe it's because I've been emptied; or maybe it's the body's way of seeing to it that I remain alive.

She's been a distraction for him, but not a necessity of life. More like a super-strong mint: intense while it lasted, but quickly finished.