Quotes About Obsessiveness

A volume of stories, bereft of continuity in plot and character, is often unified only by the writer's obsessiveness.

She was particularly jealous of the eldest, a boy, whose every movement she criticized. She watched him with an obsessiveness that was quite extraordinary to behold, and she was always putting him to work around the house, blaming him for the smallest evidence of disorder and insisting on her right to punish him for what she alone thought of as misdemeanor.

The world is full of men with strange obsessions who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

They got that way, Garraty had noticed. Complete withdrawal from everything and everyone around them. Everything but the road. They stared at the road with a kind of horrid fascination, as if it were a tightrope thay had to walk over an endless, bottomless chasm.

There is not a more melancholy object than a man who has his head turned with religious enthusiasm.

The man with but one idea in his head is sure to exaggerate that to top-heaviness, and thus he loses his equilibrium.

I'd go stupid collecting and counting my money.

I've always considered myself to be just average talent and what I have is a ridiculous insane obsessiveness for practice and preparation.

I didn't play at collecting. No cigar anywhere was safe from me.

Y cuando una niña es guapa, y cuando una niña es hermosa, el mayor poeta de Italia le dedica toda su obra, un inmenso lógico inglés pierde la razón por ella, un escritor ruso huye de su país para bautizar con su nombre una novela peligrosa, etc. Porque las niñas pueden llevar a la locura.

The hours, the dedication, the obsessiveness that must have been required to do this was breathtaking. Staggering. But you walked away not so much with admiration for the artist as concern for her mental health.

People that are obsessed with hating you, feel flattered. Their whole lives revolve around you.

Consequently, what Proust called "the demon that cannot be exorcised" has simply gone in search of a socially acceptable vocabulary.9 "Trauma," "intrusive thoughts," "flashbacks," "obsessiveness," "vigilance," and "attachment injury" are the modern vocabulary for betrayed love.

It's hard to get hot over a painting; there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music.

Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.

For a person who promised hope and civility in politics, Mr. Obama has shown a borderline obsessiveness in blaming Mr. Bush.

He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death.

People who can't think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.

Can you imagine founding a cuisine on blueberries? Everyone would be so sick of them within a week, they'd starve to death. The blueberry has no versatility. The country with a cuisine based on the blueberry would be a country of lunatics, turned mad by the unwavering sameness of their daily meals.

I love watching documentaries on people like 'clean freaks,' because it's just so interesting to me for some reason.

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

What a face this girl possessed!—Could I neither die then nor gaze at her face every day, I would need to recreate it through painting or sculpture, or through fatherhood, until a second such face could be born.

I read about a famous mystery writer who worked for one week in a department store. One day she saw a woman come in and buy a doll. The mystery writer found out the woman's name, and took a bus to New Jersey to see where the woman lived. That was all. Years later, she referred to this woman as the love of her life. It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.