Quotes About Compulsion

Authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths; totalitarians feel they must take the further step of compelling people to speak falsehoods.

If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.

You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?

I don't think it's any help that it's your habit. What would you think of a person who went about sticking pins and needles into people and saying, `Excuse me, you mustn't mind it. . .it's just a habit I've got.' You'd think he was crazy, wouldn't you?

Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

Why is it that most things you might willingly do under other circumstances become distasteful when you have no choice?

I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive. (Explaining her attraction to Moby-Dick)

It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn't scratch it.

First the man takes a drink, as one hears it said, and then the drink takes a drink. And even if that's where it stops, before the third step of and then the drink takes the man

Everybody has one thing that gets to him. Women or liquor or gambling or something. The trouble is when you've got more than one vice.

I was surprised the drugs were still around. Cops are apt to pocket them, and men who would not take loose cash from the dead have trouble resisting the little pills that pick you up or settle you down. I took the Seconal and the Dex along with me.

All things happen by virtue of necessity.

Quando (como notavelmente formulado por Erich Fromm) "cada indivíduo deve ir em frente e tentar sua sorte", quando "ele tem que nadar ou afundar" — "a busca compulsiva da certeza" se instala, começa a desesperada busca por "soluções" capazes de "eliminar a consciência da dúvida" — o que quer que prometa "assumir a responsabilidade pela 'certeza'" é bem-vindo.5

I went and bought Guitar Towns by Steve Earle instead of listening to my better self...After a bit, and despite my new relationship with time, I began to experience impatience. One song at a time was taking too long. I began to wonder if there wasn't some way I could cram all this music in at once. Oh hell. That's called fucking.

When I kicked in the first TV – a nineteen-inch Magnavox with wicker speaker panels – it felt like the most perfect thing I had done in a long time. And there's nothing like the feeling of perfection that will inspire repeated behavior

And when he had put on the yoke-strap of compulsion, his spirit's wind veering to an impious blast, impure, unholy, from that moment his mind changed to a temper of utter ruthlessness. For mortals are made reckless by the evil counsels of merciless Infatuation, beginner of disaster.

La gente, aveva concluso Dusty, può fare a meno di tante cose; il problema è che non riesce a non andare a comprarle.

I don't believe that we have any choice about our dreams. I believe they simply come to us, like head colds and bad habits.

Deseo antiguo, deseo reciente, ambos sin saciar y que seguramente no saldrían del ámbito de la obsesión.

Only when Christian faith in God is lost do people feel compelled to make use of all means—even criminal—to force the victory of their cause.

Compulsion cannot produce virtue; it can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.

L'amore? È una maledizione che piomba addosso e resistere è impossibile.

A mi dobro pišemo samo ono što nismo mogli da ne napišemo.