Quotes About Obsession

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Books are a narcotic.

We fixate on what is relevant to us, and we see what we want to see.

I studied his proud, finely carved face, and indeed no lover could have watched Helen of Troy more intently or could have been more convinced of his own inferiority.

They play with unflinching seriousness, as if life depended upon the flick of a piece or the snap of a clock - and it does. Some of these men have lost jobs and wives playing night after night, usually against the same opponent. . . . Night after night, the same men sit across from one another in the same chairs. They seem to have no sense of the passing of time.

He quite literally occupied it. At the end of a long oaken table near the window of the Writing Room was "the Hitler Chair." It had the best light for painting postcards. Nobody but Adolf dared sit there. Everybody honored his obsession with the chair, partly out of gratitude: If a Männerheim tenant fell short of his week's rent, Hitler was amazingly fast in organizing a collection.

I loved him in the way young people are mad for those they wish to resemble.

A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it. In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money, and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting, but never joining. In short, an outsider.

People who love books never have spare time!

There is a bookseller out there for every bibliophilic obsession known to humankind. You want a seventeenth-century book on microscopy with engraved illustrations on the life cycle of mosquitoes? There is a dealer who can provide you with that. You fancy rare volumes on Antarctic exploration or the history of ancient Egyptians?

I hadn't been a nerd, mind you. I'd just been the type of guy who spent a lot of time by himself, focused entirely on a single consuming interest.

A man is what he has passion about.

When we obsess over our parenting choices to the extent that most of us do, and then see someone else making different choices, we often perceive that difference as direct criticism of how we are parenting.

Whether he was really a Martian or really crazy barely even mattered. He was still incredible. And I was head over heels in love with him.

You deny it all you want, but you are mine. Call it passion, call it obsession, call it whatever pleases you, but you run hot and wild in my blood, Katherine-I cannot give you up.

I'm into, oh murders and executions mostly. It depends.

I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?

Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.

My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realise I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

Thoreau thought obsessively about time and the various ways it could be manipulated by writing; he collapses the two years he spent at Walden into one for the sake of "convenience," but surely also for the sake of artistry.

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous-or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all – whey then you're beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.

It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games

the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object.

I'm capable of nothing with regard to you . . . but just of being infernally in love with you.