Quotes About Obsession

That was when the myth of America started to take hold of Iran. Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost.

Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream.

We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

It had been more than a month since Donald Trump had inserted himself into the national political dialogue. My advisors and I had assumed that, having milked it for all it was worth, the media would gradually tire of his obsession with my birth. And yet, like algae in a stagnant pond, the number of stories on his conspiratorial musings proliferated with each passing week.

T]he immune system is a metaphor for the self. Its ostensible job is the defense of the organism, but it is potentially a treacherous defender, like the Praetorian guard that turns its swords against the emperor. Just as the immune system can unleash the inflammations that ultimately kill us, the self can pick at a psychic scar - often some sense of defeat or abandonment - until a detectable illness appears, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, or crippling anxiety.

Analizând preocup?rile de ast?zi pentru practicarea fitnessului, f?r? îndoial? c? un psihiatru de la jum?tatea secolului al XX-lea ar g?si numeroase motive s? suspecteze o gam? larg? de tulbur?ri mintale - masochism, narcisism, tulburare obsesiv-compulsiv? - fiecare dintre acestea putând semnala necesitatea unei intervenÈ›ii medicale.

Whatever you want the most, it's going to be the worst thing for you.

She would die of him or be cured.

Moths must fly to his flame and perish gladly.

I envied them with an intensity near to love, and near to rage.

The first time I went in, he didn't notice me because of reading a book. Not regular reading, I mean gone. He and that big book were not in this house, nor maybe this world.

She was sitting at a table in a cafe and he had just left. What she has understood, with absolute certainty, was that to live without him would be, forever, her fundamental occupation and that from that moment on things would always have a shadow for her, an extra shadow, even in the dark, and maybe especially in the dark. She wondered if that might work as an explanation of what it means to be mad about someone.

There was a time when I didn't seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life fate had denied him.

Goddamn it, I thought, at the mention of her name. I just couldn't get clear of these people. They were like cancer. You think you've cut it out, it always comes back.

And one can better understand figures in arctic exploration so obsessed with their own achievement that they found it irksome to acknowledge the Eskimos, unnamed companions, and indefatigable dogs who helped them.

As a historian I am no longer obsessed with the theological question of how God became a man, but with the historical question of how a man became God.

Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals.

Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader.

She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.

But fascination is fear's twin brother

Free, free, free... necromancer, I love you.

The central reason that Bush rejected the ambitious option of long-term engagement in Afghanistan, however, was that his attention was focused elsewhere. He understood the importance of stabilizing Afghanistan and would certainly have been happy to capture bin Laden and his henchmen, but his zeal for these projects paled beside his obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Fulfillment of Central Committee directives became Stalin's mantra, and suspicion of non-fulfillment, his obsession.

We all have a central fiction about ourselves, a favored delusion about talent or untapped potential. Most of us hang on to it as if it were a lifesaver, even though the obsession with it is often the very thing that drags us down and prevents us from fulfilling some lesser but more obtainable goal.