c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.
— Gautama Buddha
I’ll love you with all my heart, in every life, through every death. Iwill not be bound by anything but my love for you.
— Lauren Kate, Passion
What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.
— Alexander Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
— James Joyce, Dubliners
I will love you when you are a still day.I will love you when you are a hurricane.
— Clementine von Radics
Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you... I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is all symphonic, and I am so aroused by living - god, Henry, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness... Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on... I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.
— Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin  Henry Miller, 1932-1953
He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.
— Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus
Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man.
— Hayao Miyazaki
Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
— Werner Herzog
The eyes are one of the most powerful tools a woman can have. With one look, she can relay the most intimate message. After the connection is made, words cease to exist. 
— Jennifer Salaiz
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
— John  Adams, The Portable John Adams
I love you, he thought, looking at Win. I love every part of you, every thought and word... the entire complex, fascinating bundle of all the things you are. I want you with ten different kinds of need at once. I love all the seasons of you, the way you are now, the thought of how much more beautiful you'll be in the decades to come. I love you for being the answer to every question my heart could ask.And it seemed so easy, once he capitulated. It seemed natural and right.Kev wasn't certain if he was surrendering to Win or to his own passion for her. Only that there was no more holding back. He would take her. And he would give her everything he had, every part of his soul, even the broken pieces.
— Lisa Kleypas, Seduce Me at Sunrise
I will wait for you as long as it takes. I will love you every moment across time.
— Lauren Kate
We fucked a flame into being.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
Derek's breath touched Sara's throat in unsteady urges. "Sometimes," he whispered, "I'm so close to you ... and I'm still not close enough. I want to share your breath ... every beat of your heart."He cradled her head in both his hands, his mouth hot on her neck. "Sometimes," he murmured, "I want to punish you a little.""Why?""For making me want you until I ache with it. For the way I wake at night just to watch you sleeping." His face was intense and passionate above her, his green eyes sharp in their brightness. "I want you more each time I'm with you. It's a fever that never leaves me. I can't be alone without wondering where you are, when I can have you again." His lips possessed hers in a kiss that was both savage and tender, and she opened to him eagerly.
— Lisa Kleypas, Dreaming of You
Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox
—  that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there.
Maybe she had it wrong all this time and her empty heart could never be filled by his ingenious broken spirit. Maybe this yearning had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with her.
— Coco J. Ginger
The Sun will rise and set regardless. What we choose to do with the light while it's here is up to us. Journey wisely.
— Alexandra Elle
Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
She stood before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest, and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors, belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
He opened his eyes to reveal the storm within him. “My every instinct is telling me to have my way with you.” He was dead serious and my cheeks heated. Fire shone in his eyes and I broke eye contact, burying my face into his cotton-covered chest. “But not nearly as difficult as going all this time without you,” he said.
— Wendy Higgins, Sweet Peril
Quick-loving hearts ... may quickly loathe.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
She was at that crucial age when a women begins to regret having stayed faithful to a husband she never really loved, when the glowing sunset colors of her beauty offer her one last, urgent choice between maternal and feminine love. At such a moment a life that seemed to have chosen its course long ago is questioned once again, for the last time the magic compass needle of the will hovers between final resignation and the hope of erotic experience.
— Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
— Annie Dillard
Falling in love is easy. Falling in love with the same person repeatedly is extraordinary.
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading
Love is not a hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always, wild!
— John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga
Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists
—  indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She's refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
I do know that I don't want to wake him.We were up very late last night.
— Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me
The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
— Oscar Wilde
I have loved him too much not to hate
— Jean Racine, Andromaque
If we don't fight for what we 'stand for' with our passionate words and honest actions, do we really 'stand' for anything?
— Tiffany Madison, Black and White
I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.
— Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
To this day she could make tap water boil just by kissing him.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen
Now he was nothing to her, just a lesson in time, a wicked boy-man, incapable of wealth or prestige.
— Coco J. Ginger
It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood...
— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn.
— John Wesley
I felt for the tormented whirlwindsDamned for their carnal sinsCommitted when they let their passions rule their reason.
— Dante Alighieri
That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle--behold, the Running Man.Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everyhing else we ove--everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires' it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.
— Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Gauguin was a stockbroker in Paris, married, had five kids. One day he came home from work and told his wife he was leaving, that he was through supporting the family, that he had had enough. Just like that he fucking took off. He said he had always felt that he was a painter, so he moved to a rat-infested shithole and started painting. His wife begged him to come back, his bosses told him he was insane, he didn't care, he was following his heart. He left Paris, moved to Rouen, went from Rouen to Arles, from Arles to Tahiti. He was searching for peace, contentment, trying to fill that fucking hole he felt inside, and he believed he could fill it. He died in Tahiti, blind and crazy from syphilis, but he did it. He filled his fucking hole, made beautiful work, made beautiful, beautiful work... It takes a brave man to walk away, to care so much that he doesn't care about anything else, to be willing to obey what he feels inside, to be willing to suffer the consequences of living for himself. Every time I stand before his work it makes me cry, and I cry because I'm proud of him, and happy for him, and because I admire him.
— James Frey, My Friend Leonard
Do you know what passion is?”I blink, confused.“Most people think it only means desire. Arousal. Wild abandon. But that’s not all. The word derives from the Latin. It means suffering. Submission. Pain and pleasure, Nikki. Passion.
— J. Kenner, Release Me
The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but on the mastery of his passions.
— Alfred Tennyson
Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches.
— Laura Esquivel
And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
LUCE: You really beleive this? That someday I'll live through this?DANIEL: With all my heart and soul, I will wait for you as long as it takes. I will love you every moment across time.-Daniel & Luce, PASSION
— Lauren Kate, Passion
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, The Picture of Dorian Gray
One declaims endlessly against the passions
—  one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.
Maybe it’s just in America, but it seems that if you’re passionate about something, it freaks people out. You’re considered bizarre or eccentric. To me, it just means you know who you are.
— Tim Burton
I want to kiss you.” Jace’s whisper pulled me from my thoughts and I glanced up to find his eyes blazing with raw need. “Just because Marc won’t touch you doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. Right? I don’t have that kind of self-control, and honestly, I don’t see the point in it. Are you supposed to be impressed by how long we can go without touching you? ’Cause if that’s the game we’re playing, I think I’d rather lose.
— Rachel Vincent, Alpha
Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking
— Amy Jenkins
Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.
— Mario Puzo, Fools Die
Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
— Graham Greene
Passion often makes fools of the wisest men and gives the silliest wisdom.
— François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims
They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
I wonder if she realizes how passionate she is about not being passionate.
— Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth's human shores,Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors--No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,And so live ever--or else swoon to death. Glanzvoller Stern! wär ich so stet wie du,Nicht hing ich nachts in einsam stolzer Pracht!SchautŽ nicht mit ewigem Blick beiseite zu,Einsiedler der Natur, auf hoher WachtBeim Priesterwerk der Reinigung, das die See,Die wogende, vollbringt am Meeresstrand;Noch starrt ich auf die Maske, die der SchneeSanft fallend frisch um Berg und Moore band.Nein, doch unwandelbar und unentwegtMöchtŽ ruhn ich an der Liebsten weicher Brust,Zu fühlen, wie es wogend dort sich regt,Zu wachen ewig in unruhiger Lust,Zu lauschen auf des Atems sanftes Wehen -So ewig leben - sonst im Tod vergehen!
— John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
She knew exactly how he was feeling, because experience had taught her that the kind of excitement she was feeling at that moment was never, ever one-sided. On the contrary, she knew that it was born of acute and mutual anticipation, and she knew, too, that it would not be denied.
— Jack Whyte, Uther
Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you've lost forever. There is only now.
— Jeanette Winterson
One day, our love will conquer this dark circle. That's worth everything to me
— Lauren Kate
Their sudden intimacy was like the explosive combustion that engulfs and consumes a moth that has fluttered too close to a candle flame
—  a completely unexpected turn of events that took both of them unawares and swept them irresistibly up and out of themselves as it hurled them into each other’s arms.
It is still news to her that passioncould steer her wrongthough she went down, a thousand timesstrung outacross railroad tracks, off bridgesunder cars, or stiffglass bottle still in hand, hair softon greasy pillows, still it isnews she cannot follow love (hisburning footsteps in blue crystalsnow) & stillcome out all right.
— Diane di Prima
The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.
— Nikolai Gogol
Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless
I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
I, while the gods laugh, the world's vortex am;Maelström of passions in that hidden seaWhose waves of all-time lap the coasts of me;And in small compass the dark waters
— Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems
He took her into his arms again, using all his strength to be gentle, and let his lips touch hers so lightly he could hardly feel it.
— Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland
Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.
— George Lois
Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.
— Arthur Conan Doyle
Infatuation. First Love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.
— Nora Roberts, Midnight Bayou
I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.
— Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere: Selected Poems
Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don’t coast through life without a passion.
— John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life
The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine
— George Sand
I have never been loved enough to gain the desire of reproducing a being in the image of my lover and I have never been given enough pleasure so that my brain has not had the leisure to seek better...I have wanted the impossible...
— Rachilde, Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel
Ed?" Ritchie says later. We're still standing in the water. "There's only one thing I want.""What's that, Ritchie?"His answer is simple."To want.
— Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger
Passion is a rather frightening thing because if you have passion you don't know where it will take you.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152
— Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what's in a name? 
— Helen Hunt Jackson
This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
— Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The voice sank through luce's skin and straight into her heart. Daniel's voice. He was calling to her. He wanted her. Needed her. Luce moved towards the sound
— Lauren Kate
For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such a disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.
— Thomas Mann
She had missed him so long now, that the feeling had become a part of her. As each day passed, the missing distanced itself from her heart. One day she woke, and realized the missing was there but the pain was gone. Missing without pain is tolerable. Pain linked to heartache is intolerable.
— Coco J. Ginger
Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.
— Bernie Mcgill, The Butterfly Cabinet
I didn’t want anybody seeing my fire until I burned them with it.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his
—  she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.
Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.
— Clarice Lispector
My skin will never work like that again, so aware of the other person that I'm unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with another person.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
In his youth, he was electrified. The stars were moving in his bloodstream. He would not have been cowed by the customs of an earthly monarch. When he loved, it was with a heat and a desperation that he carried like a sword. He loved in the way that Greeks burned cities.
— Brenna Yovanoff
Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may livethrough its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Working hard for something we don't care about is called stress: Working hard for something we love is called passion.
— Simon Sinek
It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions.
— Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasise your breasts. I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was to fasten my index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations.
— Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
I thought of you with your hair silver as snow all through that cold, slow journey from Sirle. I felt you troubled deep within me, and there was no other place in the world I would rather have been than in the cold night riding to you. When you opened your gates to me, I was home.
— Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
In would rather die of passion than of boredom.
— Vincent van Gogh
You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life.
— Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
She wanted to write to him. Tell him she was glad he was back, that he was alive, that he was home and safe. But words to him no longer fit right in her her mouth.Words which belonged in his ownership were no longer hers to give. Silence was the only acceptable state her heart would grant. He would never know what he missed, because she refused to be heard in his presence. All the words he could have had, all the phrases he might have danced with. The smiles which would have been imprinted upon his heart, would never be. And his lips would never be able to reply to the words she could not say.
— Coco J. Ginger
I am in love with you', I responded.He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh.'Of course you are,' he replied. 'I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.'It was my turn to laugh.
— Anne Rice, Blackwood Farm
Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Compassion is a lifetime business. You can't say something like, "I will have compassion on Monday, Thursdays and Fridays only. But for the rest, I will be cruel". That is hypocrisy.
— Israelmore Ayivor
The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness, in heat, in longing, in risk, I find something of love's nature. In my desire for you, I burn at the right temperature to walk through love's fire. So when you ask me why I cannot love you more calmly, I answer that to love you calmly is not to love you at all.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook
If you have no good drive in you, your life will not be steered through a good direction. It will miss its destined station. Passion or drive is what moves the vehicle of a fulfilled life.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Why do some people stop growing at age 30, just going from work to the couch and television, when others stay vibrant, curious, almost childlike into their nineties?
— Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World
Never allow anything to divert you from your insight into Jesus Christ. It is the true test of whether you are spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing fascination for you. Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus, I’ve lost sight of all beside, So enchained my spirit’s vision, Gazing on the Crucified.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
— John  Adams
A rare, deep and passionate love.
— Guillaume Musso, Que serais-je sans toi?
Only little boys and old men sneer at love.
— Louis Auchincloss
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
— Henry Home
I remember passion.
— Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca
We may only ever have one great, passionate love, but sometimes it’s best to leave that kind of love in the past. A love like that can’t last forever.
— Cassia Leo, The Way We Fall
Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Passion and drive are not the same at all. Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can't tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion.....It's not about jumping through someone else's hoops. That's drive.
— Randy Komisar, The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur
What is life without this? which was why, in the end, it was I, and not her, who blurted out, not once, but many, many times, You'll kill me if you stop, you'll kill me if you stop, because it was also my way of bringing full circle the dream and the fantasy, me and him, the longed-for words from mouth to mouth, which was when I must have begun using obscenities that he repeated after me, softly at first, till he said, "Call me by your name and I'll call you by my name," which I'd never done in my life before and which, as soon as I said my own name as though it were his, took me to a realm I never shared with anyone in my life before, or since.
— André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
A bride, before a "Good-night" could be said,Should vanish from her clothes into her bed,As souls from bodies steal, and are not spied.But now she's laid; what though she be?Yet there are more delays, for where is he?He comes and passeth through sphere after sphere;First her sheets, then her arms, then anywhere.Let not this day, then, but this night be thine;Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine.
— John Donne, The Complete English Poems
No, no, don't let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming the echoes of its vibration.
— Rachilde, Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel
chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.
— Mal Peet, Tamar
She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street.
— Gabriel García Márquez
To develop emotional and erotic intelligence we need to practice enlarging our inner passion at every moment. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in our world, or even how we feel about ourselves in the moment. In fact, the best time to accomplishing something may be when we least feel like trying, because the hopeless part of ourselves most needs the light.
— Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
— W. Somerset Maugham
It is true, Monsieur," Raoule went on, shrugging her shoulders, "that I have had lovers in my life as I have books in my library, to know, to study. But I have had no passion, I have not written my own book yet! I always found myself alone when we were two. One is not weak when one remains master of one's self in the midst of the most stupefying pleasures.
— Rachilde, Monsieur Venus: A Materialist Novel
Passion can’t sustain itselfforever.
— Haruki Murakami, The Folklore of Our Times
Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.
— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse
Passion out of passion's obstacles.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Here lies a she sun, and a he moon there;She gives the best light to his sphere;Or each is both, and all, and soThey unto one another nothing owe;And yet they do, but areSo just and rich in that coin which they pay,That neither would, nor needs forbear, nor stay;Neither desires to be spared nor to spare.They quickly pay their debt, and thenTake no acquittances, but pay again;They pay, they give, they lend, and so let fallNo such occasion to be liberal.More truth, more courage in these two do shine,Than all thy turtles have and sparrows, Valentine.
— John Donne, The Complete English Poems
Have you seen what wolves do to their prey? But they do mate for life.
— Donna Lynn Hope
With horror he saw that her hair was already afire as the tarred stake burned about her head. He held her agonized gaze with his fierce black eyes. "I'll love you forever, and beyond," he vowed as he raised both arms and plunged his sword into her heart.~Marcus Magnus
— Virginia Henley, Enslaved
The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.
— Harold Norse, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003
What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.
— Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Every action is a losing, a letting go, a passing away from oneself of some bit of one’s own reality into the existence of others and of the world. In Jesus Christ, this character of action is not resisted, by trying to use our action to assert ourselves, extend ourselves, to impose our will and being upon situations. In Jesus Christ, this self-expending character of action is joyfully affirmed. I receive myself constantly from God’s Parenting love. But so far as some aspects of myself are at my disposal, these I receive to give away. Those who would live as Jesus did—who would act and purpose themselves as Jesus did—mean to love, i.e., they mean to expend themselves for others unto death. Their being is meant to pass away from them to others, and they make that meaning the conscious direction of their existence. Too often the love which is proclaimed in the churches suppresses this element of loss and need and death in activity. As a Christian, I often speak of love as helping others, but I ignore what this does to the person who loves. I ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending and losing and deterioration of the self. I speak of love as if the person loving had no problems, no needs, no limits. In other words, I speak of love as if the affluent dream were true. This kind of proclamation is heard everywhere. We hear it said: 'Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go out and help those other people who are in need?' But we never hear people go on and add: 'If you do this, you too will be driven into need.' And by not stating this conclusion, people give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia, where we can reach to everybody’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves. Believe me, there are grown-up persons who speak this kind of nonsense. And when people try to live out this illusory love, they become terrified when the self-expending begins to take its toll. Terror of relationship is [that] we eat each other. But note this very carefully: like Jesus, we too can only live to give our received selves away freely because we know our being is not thereby ended, but still and always lies in the Parenting of our God....Those who love in the name of Jesus Christ... serve the needs of others willingly, even to the point of being exposed in their own neediness.... They do not cope with their own needs. They do not anguish over how their own needs may be met by the twists and turns of their circumstances, by the whims of their society, or by the strategies of their own egos. At the center of their life—the very innermost center—they are grateful to God, because... they do not fear neediness. That is what frees them to serve the needy, to companion the needy, to become and be one of the needy.
— Arthur C. McGill, Dying Unto Life
Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.
— Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Just be careful. Passion is a bridge that connects love and hate. When you're standing in the middle of that bridge, don't let yourself get turned around. You've got to make sure you know which direction you're heading. Watch yourself.
— Jay Bell, Kamikaze Boys
A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Let all your thoughts be with the Most High, and direct your humble prayers unceasingly to Christ. If you cannot contemplate high and heavenly things, take refuge in the Passion of Christ, and love to dwell within His Sacred Wounds. For if you devoutly seek the Wounds of Jesus and the precious marks of His Passion, you will find great strength in all troubles.
— Thomas à Kempis, The Inner Life
Passion in life…is life. It’s contagious. Get naked and roll around in it. People who enjoy living have it all figured out. They are passionate, driven, alive, and they are real.
— Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace
It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Oh, mention it! If I storm, you have the art of weeping.""Mr. Rochester, I must leave you.""For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your hair — which is somewhat dishevelled; and bathe your face — which looks feverish?""I must leave Adele and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole life: I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes.""Of course: I told you you should. I pass over the madness about parting from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester — both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life. Never fear that I wish to lure you into error — to make you my mistress. Why did you shake your head? Jane, you must be reasonable, or in truth I shall again become frantic."His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated; his eye blazed: still I dared to speak."Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by yourself. If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical — is false.""Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man — you forget that: I am not long-enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to me and yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and — beware!"He bared his wrist, and offered it to me: the blood was forsaking his cheek and lips, they were growing livid; I was distressed on all hands. To agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred, was cruel: to yield was out of the question. I did what human beings do instinctively when they are driven to utter extremity — looked for aid to one higher than man: the words "God help me!" burst involuntarily from my lips."I am a fool!" cried Mr. Rochester suddenly. "I keep telling her I am not married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she knows nothing of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my infernal union with her. Oh, I am certain Jane will agree with me in opinion, when she knows all that I know! Just put your hand in mine, Janet — that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove you are near me — and I will in a few words show you the real state of the case. Can you listen to me?""Yes, sir; for hours if you will.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Diversity creates dimension in the world.
— Elizabeth Ann Lawless
Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country.
— Ethan Allen
The obsession was gone. We liked each other, even loved each other. And our sex was still good, but the hunger was gone. Either it just wore out or we wore each other out. A passion like that pushes everything else out of its path. You can't be married and have jobs and children and work and write and have something like an emotional bubonic plague.
— Stephen Dobyns, Eating Naked: Stories
Oh God, let me not be cured of love, but let my passion grow! Let me love for love's sake!
— Diane Wolkstein
My mouth hung slightly open, i was getting ready to sat something important. what i wanted to say was: I's so, so sorry. but instead I said, "i love you." Only then, when i said it out loud, did i know that it was true.Carly threaded her fingers through mine and i squeezed her hand. She said it back to me, and i was relieved in a way that i wasn't expecting. i didn't know that i needed her to say it until she did. i was so grateful; i leaned down and kissed her fearlessly, which was unlike me. When she kissed me back, i brought my hand up and cupped the nape of her neck, pulling her hair with clumsy fingers. i tried to back off, to apologize for hurting her, but she kept me close, kissing me softly at first, then hard and fast until the lines between us blurred.
— Anna Jarzab, All Unquiet Things
Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.
— Coco J. Ginger
No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith... the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.
— Nicholas Sparks, Dear John