#fish

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it. ↗

— Stephen Colbert

#christian #christian-behavior #poor #religion #selfish

I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference ↗

— Ayn Rand

#obsession #selfish-love #love

There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish. ↗

— Lydia Davis

#love #selfishness #love

Love is the most selfish of all the passions. ↗

— Alexandre Dumas

#love #passions #selfishness #the-three-musketeers #love

At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then--I don't know how it was-- I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#cruel #deception #flirting #heartbreaker #heartbroken

It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#swans #love

But part of love is a record playing, a needle that drops over and over, repeat and repeat, until the voices are scratched and the song is tired. But that's all right, all the scratches and skips, the knowing what line comes next. Sometimes a song just gets you You know? ↗

— Esm�aji Codell

#love

I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature much less by the sentiments of love and heroism but is a system of distrust not of giving, but of taking advantage. ↗

— Joshua Ferris

#system #love

Love is the demiurge that builds substance from the elements of our lives. From "Big Enough for the Entire Universe ↗

— Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

#victor-fernando-r-ocampo #love

Step by step she lived over every instant of the time she had been with Robert... She recalled his words, his looks. How few and meager they had been for her hungry heart! ... She wondered when he would come back. He had not said he would come back. She had been with him had heard his voice and touched his hand. But some way he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico. ↗

— Kate Chopin

#love