Quotes About Compulsion

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

I'm addicted to the deal, to the next thing. It's irresistible.

All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours.

Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts.

I was fascinated by the story. I couldn't believe that anyone would be so sexually driven that he might actually skip lunch- and after an auction. I think of myself as a healthy person with a strong sex drive, but it's never occurred to me to forego meals.

He trailed off as he saw the books. Piles and stacks of them beside the sofa, another stack on the coffee table, a sea of them on her dining table. Jesus Christ, Dane, you need treatment.

If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.

The need to take her was raging, some fatal drug that stabbed into his veins, speeding up his heartbeat and clouding his mind.

I know why you came. Because you couldn't stay away. I understand that. Now you're just going to have to accept what comes with it.

If I were writing a book I'd talk about it all the time, to everyone. People would start to avoid me, so I'd seek out complete strangers and talk about it until they, too, avoided me.

Somehow it's hard to quit with an odd number of fish, so I wanted one more for four

The compulsion to reconsider the past through the ideals and beliefs of the present is constant and overwhelming. It allows for a sense of moral clarity and feels more enlightened. But it's actually just easier than trying to understand how things felt when they originally occurred.

I won­der if run­ning is just an­oth­er fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a prob­lem I can't re­mem­ber.

The desire for perfection is like a pit of wet coal silt: it will grab your boots like iron hands and never let you go. 13.

With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.

a creature of impulse.

Besides, he guessed she wouldn't have thanked him for delaying his purchase. She needed dope more than she needed him.

the fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so.

A book collector is mad enough to begin with, Watson; but tempt him with some such bait as this Shakespeare quarto and he is bereft of all sanity.

Unconscionable Love, To what extremes will you not drive our hearts!

O tyrant love, to what do you not drive the hearts of men.

Coffee and smoking are the last great addictions.

A good book is like an unreachable itch. You just can't leave it alone.

Three months after Rachel was born, Lou admitted smuggling her into church. "It wasn't my fault," she said, after she'd confessed. "I was compelled." "What do you mean, compelled?" Andy had asked, annoyed, betrayed, but also consumed by tenderness the way he always was when he watched Louisa breast-feed.