Desire Quotes

Why so scrawny, cat?Starving for fat fish or mice...Or backyard love?

~ Bashō Matsuo

...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...

~ Albert Camus

She wanted to be the rain, to cover him with moisture, to bring life to his seed.

~ Caris Roane

Lust is a tool, desire a trap. Wield the first, and you can take someone’s soul. Fall into the second, and they can take yours. ~ Isadora Conti to Grayson van Court

~ Riley Shane

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire

~ Roland Barthes

What was he? A mere human, stuck between the rungs of blended adolescence and nascent adulthood. What power did he command over the mysterious forces of love? Which sword could shatter the impenetrable armour of desire?

~ Faraaz Kazi

By the end of the seventies the feared yet desired black male body had become as objectified as it was during slavery, only a seemingly positive twist had been added to the racist sexist objectification: the black male body had become the site for the personification of everyone’s desire.

~ Bell Hooks

Did my moral upbrining somehow turn against itself? If looking at someone with desire was as bad as satisfying the desire, if having an active fantasy was as bad as the act you were fantasizing- then why not the satisfaction and the act itself? As the days went on, I discovered that I couldn't stop thinking sinful thoughts. In which case I also wanted the sin itself.

~ Bernhard Schlink

I think I am a rare breed, a homosexual who doesn't like men.

~ Michel Tremblay

what was a rose but the living proof of desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. but desire could be twisted,after all, and Jealousy was the name of the rose that did well in arid souls.

~ Alice Hoffman

I don’t want the finer things in life, like preserves of jam and thick soft quilts, until I get what I need: the machinery to make that stuff for me.

~ M.c. Humphreys

There's a chasm between envy and desire. Envy is like wanting something that's not yours. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it's not yet there, but it's not envy.

~ Michka Assayas

The desire to be desire-less is but another desire. The thought that, because this desire purports to be spiritual, it is superior to more mundane desires shows how skilled the mind is at justifying any desire it is attached to.

~ Joel Kramer

Every man has his secret desire, I suppose, and mine is someday to own a farm.

~ A.g. Street

Peter Wessel and Peter Van Daan have grown into one Peter, who is beloved and good, and for whom I long desperately.

~ Anne Frank

With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.

~ Sarah Waters

The object of your desire is not an object.

~ Jack Gardner

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.

~ Herman E. Daly

Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum.

~ Frederick Douglass

Lust for possession and greed has ravaged the soul of humanity like a great cancer, metastasizing throughout society in the form of a nouveau post-human, consumer hedonism.

~ Bryant Mcgill

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

~ Wilkie Collins

The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like ... robotics. Just another subject that she couldn’t understand at all.

~ Meg Wolitzer

He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him - like an actor kissed in a picture.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous beings who get to decide who we are going to be, but we are likely much more malleable than we think. We are often defined by the structure that keeps us captive. In some ways our desires are so socially constructed that they can't rightfully be called our own.

~ Debbie Blue

The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good and the fear of evil.

~ Amit Abraham

It's precisely in despair that you find the most intense pleasure, especially if you are already powerfully conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.

~ Jeff Lindsay

We want more than there is.

~ Jonathan Goldstein

Humans do not possess a single, focused will. In their hearts, they have countless bugs, buzzing in all directions. There are times when all these bugs pounce on the same food, but when they are focused on different desires, people take actions that can only be described as incoherent.

~ Kouhei Kadono

One must count ones riches by the means one has to satisfy his desires.

~ Antoine François Prévost D'exiles

Sexual expression is so powerful a way of bonding with others and so devastating a way of hurting others that it can never be reduced to a mere matter of personal preferences. Sexual desires have immense capacities to order or disorder the social world. Because of this, the social meanings and expressions of sexual desire, connections, and taboos are an organizing component of human societies: Who wants whom? Who belongs with whom? Who is forbidden to whom? What do infractions mean, and what are their consequences?

~ Rachel Adler

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and comfort -- sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine. This state of affairs, which arose out of a struggle against poverty, overshoots its ultimate goal -- the liberation of humanity from material cares -- and becomes an obsessive image hanging over the present. Between love and a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have made their choice and prefer the garbage disposal. A complete and sudden change of spirit has become essential, by bringing to light forgotten desires and creating entirely new ones. And by an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)

~ Tom Mcdonough

There is no Christianity unless first there is repentance. And it is not just, “Well, I am guilty.” It is not just a conviction. It is a conviction plus a desire to turn away from those things.

~ Brian Richardson

I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other that night, there on a bed of fallen pine needles-even today, the scent of pitch-pine stirs me-with Henry's distant flute for a wedding march and the arching white birch boughs for our basilica. At first, she quivered like an aspen, and I was ashamed at my lack of continence, yet I could not let go of her. I felt like Peleus on the beach, clinging to Thetis, only to find that, suddenly, it was she who held me; that same furnace in her nature that had flared up in anger blazed again, in passion.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Could it be that desire for a good thing has become a bad thing because that desire has become a ruling thing?

~ Paul David Tripp

When the mouth cries, I want to see God, the heart has reached its finest moment. Once we have sought and seen God, all other things have a way of finding us.

~ Gayle D. Erwin

I do not mind when you tell me what you want and put that first instead of last.

~ John Scalzi

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

~ Italo Calvino

Supporting God's Scriptural ability to give or restrain man's desires, Jerry Bridges points to an amazing verse tucked away in Exodus 34:24. As Israel's people abandon their defense entirely to have a feast before Him three times per year, God says the surrounding peoples will be entirely devoid of even the logical desire to possess their land.

~ Jerry Bridges

Gerdanlouk, he thinks. An evocative Turkish word, with Arabic roots. It means jewelry, but only jewelry adorning a woman between her lower neck and the top of her breasts. Gerdanlouk. He looks away.

~ Jenny White