Quotes About Obsession

How did I get involved? As a young man I chanced to flirt with it and it possessed me.

Joshua had been overcome by his own righteous indignation. He had become so obsessed with Yahweh's war that he forgot he was a servant and not the sovereign. He became momentarily blinded by the delusion that he could do no wrong. And when his hatred for evil was projected outward, he was overwhelmed by his rage and forgot the evil in himself. His momentary madness was the potential of every living person.

Your genius is its own distraction. It consumes you in ways nothing else can. It pulls you away like a jealous lover.

You can judge an idea by your obsession with it. Look at how you spend your time, you will see what is important to you.

Shower while there were two dead bodies in the bathtub, and he was sane. He drilled holes in the heads of living people to make them his unresisting companions, and he was sane. He ate a bicep which he fried in a skillet, tenderised and sprinkled with sauce, and he was sane. For hours he lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them, and he was sane. He kept eleven assorted heads and skulls, and two complete skeletons, for eventual use in a home-made temple, and he was sane.

it's taking over me.

I grew up doing all that stuff because I was obsessed with the '50s. I had sock hops for birthday parties. So I've always done The Twist and stuff. It was pretty natural and, with my parents doing it all the time, I'd just copy them. Not very pretty.

Fear and love might leave a man complacent, but jealousy will always get him out of the van.

I admit to wasting my life messing around with fast cars and motorcycles.

There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.

What consumes your mind controls your life.

Jung called this practice counterbalancing one-sidedness. Our lives become too tilted toward one aspect of our identity and too tilted away from others. We're all familiar with these scenarios. We become so obsessed with our work we neglect our family; we become so consumed with caring for children we overlook ourselves; we become so focused on serving others we ignore our loved ones. The more purely one thing we are, the more in danger we are of overlooking other things.

This is an obsessive configuration insofar as the obsessive's desire is always for something impossible: to attain an unattainable status (e.g., perfection, omniscience, or immortality), to complete an uncompletable project, or to possess what he cannot possess. In saying that the obsessive is characterized by an impossible desire, Lacan goes so far as to add that his desire is for impossibility itself.

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease, when the mind is obsessed with it.

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.

Brixie wasn't talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Brixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave.»

but they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of the Library, and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and fly around in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and their planet…. It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human wreckage.

Sometimes power is all a person has, so they will protect it even unto their own destruction, for without power they have nothing.

Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train.

He saw her eyes bright as stars; he saw her lips, and was not satisfied with only seeing them.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

blow your trump— blister your lungs!—Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!

Command the murderous chalices...Drink ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick!