Quotes About Compulsion

I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief—nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder. It's a compulsion with you, and now it's coming home to you—

I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was.

People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can't predict it. That's love.

I know exactly what I'm doing, but I just can't stop. That's my greatest weakness.

The image of her in another man's arms was stuck in my mind, as real as life. As if there was a demon with nowhere else to go clinging to a corner of the ceiling, eyes fastened on me.

Pills and fortune-telling and dieting: nobody can stop her when it comes to any of those things.

The books I like to read the most feel like they've been written by somebody who had to write them or go crazy. They had to get them out of their heads. I like that kind of urgency.

Anything you can do in excess for the wrong reasons is exciting to me.

I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.

I hate to say it, but, yeah, I'm a tobacco junkie.

When I was a kid, I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year. I refused to step out of the door because I thought something would happen. I had all these compulsive thoughts or whatever, and my head was really messed up.

Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.

I do have a touch of OCD, and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton.

I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I'll do it again.

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes neccessity.

Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.

Theft is punished by Thy law, O Lord, and the law written in the hearts of men, which iniquity itself effaces not. For what thief will abide a thief? not even a rich thief, one stealing through want. Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, nor poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing, and a pamperedness of iniquity. For I stole that, of which I had enough, and much better. Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but joyed in the theft and sin itself.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.

Das Leben zwingt den Menschen zu allerlei freiwilligen Handlungen.

Les monomaniques de tout poil, les gens qui sont possédés par une seule idée m'ont toujours spécialement intrigué, car plus un esprit se limite, plus il touche par ailleurs à l'infini.

That's the most mysterious thing about love—it takes hold of you whether you're ready or not." She swallowed. "But it hurts." "It's supposed to. Otherwise, you wouldn't notice.

up to), she'd simply made a spectacle of herself. And the kicker was, she couldn't explain what had made her do what

You will stop turning to food when you start understanding in your body, not just your mind, that there is something better...Truth, not force, does the work of ending compulsive eating.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.