#desi

You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it. ↗

— Samuel R. Delany

#life

By annihilating the desires, you annihilate the mind. Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act. ↗

— Claude Adrien Helvetius

#action #annihilate #annihilating #desires #every

It's always nice being wanted. Even if it's by the wrong person. ↗

— Tabitha Suzuma

#desire

I'm sentimental--I know. I'm desperate and silly--I know that too. Oh, help me! ↗

— Anne Frank

#love #love

I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas, how many yearning thoughts, what great desire, have lead them through such sorrow to their fate? ↗

— Dante Alighieri

#fate #love #sorrow #love

Phaedra keeps saying she's being selfish. That she hates herself for it, but she does it anyway. She can't deny herself what she wants, even if it brings about her downfall and his." "And have you learned anything from our literary parallel?" "Not really, I keep thinking that she would do it all over again if there were a chance...a chance that it could go right. Even if 99 times out of a 100 the story ends badly, it's worth it if only once she gets a happy ending. ↗

— Cora Carmack

#chance-and-fortune #desire #garrick #guilt #hope

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#curiosity #desire #life #love #passion

She'd been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster. ↗

— Michele Young-Stone

#loneliness #longing #loveless #love

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope. ↗

— Anne Carson

#desire #eros-the-bittersweet #hope #love #romance

She nodded against me. “Do you need me to do anything?” I didn’t need a thing from her, but I wanted everything. I wanted her to leave Tyler, to love me, to want to live here with me for the rest of our lives. I wanted so damn much. ”Just go back to sleep, then enjoy the rest of the day with the girls. I’ll be back tonight.” ”I’ll be waiting her for you.” Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath in and held it. if only she knew what she did to me. ↗

— Molly McAdams

#from-ashes #love #molly-mcadams #rest-of-our-lives #romance