Quotes About Compulsion

The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you anyway.

And fairly enough she thought, for that was the way of the world. A road was to be driven upon. The candy dish was there to be eaten, money in the bank got spent, people claimed whatever they could get their hands on. Wasn't that more or less automatic? For a human being to do any less seemed impossible.

as long as you're living with an addict, you're addicted.

Love and sex, honey. Either one can make you do the damndest things. The two combined will make you a sure 'nough fool.

I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else.

It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out-and come back for more.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

I don't think anyone who falls in love has a choice. You're just pulled to that person like true north, whether it's good for you or bound to break your heart.

He that would be a painter must have a natural turn thereto. Love and delight therein are better of the Art of Painting than compulsion.

love is a mental illness, an obsessive-compulsive disorder romanticized!

As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.

They did it for love, and sometimes love makes us do the irrational .. even the inexcusable.

Once a properly functional hierarchy has been established, an opportunity opens for its positions of authority to be usurped, not by people who have the competence demanded by the task at hand, but by those willing to use manipulation, deceit, and compulsion to gain status and control.

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth - or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives - they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don't believe that they deserve any better. Freud called this a "repetition compulsion." He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past - sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, because no alternatives beckon.

Jacob slid down my body and knelt in front of me. The two of us were wedged into the narrow lane between the and the dresser. He took the front button of my shirt into his mouth. I heard a snap. He spat, and a button pinged to the floor. He was nuts. He'd scammed the quarterly mental health exam and was certifiably insane. Not that that's ever stopped me from sleeping with anyone.

João José, o Professor, desde o dia em que furtara um livro de histórias numa estante de uma casa da Barra, se tornara perito nestes furtos. Nunca, porém, vendia os livros, que ia empilhando num canto do trapiche, sob tijolos, para que os ratos não os roessem. Lia-os todos numa ânsia que era quase febre.

We're a compulsive but amiable crew, those of us who feel, or have felt, the compulsion to re-record the bright thoughts of other men and women.

He could not write what he wanted, but what he had to.

All of us, gay and non-gay, who share the visions of America as a nation that believes that all people have the right to be both different and equal, and that without real and sufficient justification, government may not compel people to give up their differences in order to be treated equally...

I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can't write about, though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.

I write because I can't imagine not writing.

Animal hoarding was a dirty secret until hoarders appeared on our TV screens and showed how they are compelled to collect so many dogs, cats or parrots that the animals end up in cages only inches bigger than their own bodies. For life.

As a writer, I have this compulsion to take characters who appear formidable and bombard them with adversity until they crumble. What's interesting is watching them rise again, and seeing how they've changed and grown, if indeed they have.