c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
And yet, about two weeks after his arrival, all I wanted every night was for him to leave his room, not via its front door, but through the French windows on our balcony. I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he’d step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I’d been rehearsing for days now, Please, don’t hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.
— André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
Desires are only a problem when the means to fulfill them are not available.
— Marty Rubin
I want his eyes to stop looking at me like that, and at the same time, I have always wanted to be looked at just like that. Now, when I look into the brown depths of his eyes… I feel desired. I feel confident.I feel free.I feel like a woman.
— Anna B. Doe, Lost & Found
Anger or rage (mênis, thumos, orgê) is an emotion, a mixture of belief and desire. It is not a somatic feeling, as nausea and giddiness are, though it is usually accompanied by such feelings – trembling and blushing, for example, and the sense of seeing red. It is, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘a desire, accompanied by pain, to take apparent revenge for apparent insult’.
— C. D. C. Reeve
Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
You are too young, I think, to understand yet the nature of desire. You know what it is to want, perhaps even to yearn, but true desire is something else entirely.
— Augustus Rose, The Readymade Thief
You will get when you deserve, not when you desire! So Accept Life and Live in the Now!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there's nothing left to wait for.
— Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Endless Nights Special #1
That was desire messing with physics: putting its finger on the record and then slowing it down, making sure you heard every word spoken, and memorized it.
— Heather O'Neill, The Lonely Hearts Hotel
Ladies, I think I speak for the majority of us on the face of the planet when I say we all have that guy who’s grown on us like a f*cking fungus. You know the kind I’m talking about--maybe he was your high school teacher or best friend’s dad--some piece of man candy so hot and edible that no matter what you do, you can’t outrun the pull he has on you.
— Kellie Hart, Bombshell
Mythology and religion are relevant and remarkable, as they each represent imaginative truths – projections of human beings innermost desires – intermixed with fragments of factual reality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
If those who cause destruction have come to be ‘newsworthy’, and those who heal the devastation of that destruction have come to be less than ‘noteworthy’, has our thirst to be entertained become the truly destructive thing?
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I had shelved expectations of another kiss
—  the intensity of not kissing now worked almost as well—the proximity and denial.
Let us not still our anger against indifference and inattention and let us not glitziness, superciliousness and mumbo jumbo slither into our thinking and our actions, if we don’t want our conscience to be backfired on. (“Twilight of desire”)
— Erik Pevernagie
Ah, desire. Such a poisonous thing.
— Roshani Chokshi, A Crown of Wishes
I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Eternity is pure and knows to give you what you desire … You have to be clear what you ask for, or else you’ll get what you deserve.
— Sandeep Sahajpal
...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.
— Amin Maalouf, Balthasar's Odyssey
Johnathan had known he wouldn't be able to simply shut off his thoughts and go to sleep. His entire body - everything he could feel, at least - was like a tightly coiled spring.
— Lyn Ducoty, A Pocketful of Dreams
Johnathan had known he wouldn't be able to simply shut off his thoughts and go to sleep. His entire body - everything he could feel, at leas- was like a tightly coiled spring.
— Lyn Ducoty, A Pocketful of Dreams
Johnathan had known he wouldn't be able to simply shut off his thoughts and go to sleep. His entire body - everything he could feel, at leastleast like a tightly coiled spring.
— Lyn Ducoty, A Pocketful of Dreams
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. The desire and ability to press on has and always will solve the problems of the human race and divide those who achieve from those who might have been.
— Jeffrey Fry
Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold
I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold
There can be no god without desire.
— David Vann, Bright Air Black
It displeases me to have some creature think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, automatically adapting himself to what he supposes to be my taste.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
When we stake a claim to the needs and wants of our life, we may easily fail to live up to the standards of others. Empathy and connectedness, however, might bridge the gap, by stirring our consciousness of the sensitive queries and by assessing the intricate framework of our surroundings with their countless, prickly nitty-gritties. ("Absence of Desire")
— Erik Pevernagie
So you’re saying they don’t want to kill us, they want to fuck us?”“At that level of desire the two acts are interchangeable, sir.
— Matt Wallace, Lustlocked
Your desire shall be your delight.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The drive to know fuels the desire to seek.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I could stand before him, be in his arms as I was just then, and still be lost to him, some phantom of a desire he cherished more than he cherished me, the woman he claimed to love.
— Alexander Chee, The Queen of the Night
And beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?''To live,' said Camilla.'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
The Root Cause of Our Problems is The Attachment To Possessions and #Desire for more.#KnowThyself
— Gian Kumar, Know Thyself - Unraveling the Mystery of Mind
Why are we so unconcerned with the great desire of God’s heart?
— Sunday Adelaja
If I ever meet you againI’ll just look at your eyesI will try to smile…Smile and savor the momentBut we ‘ll live in our own worldA world devoid of anxiety and acrimony.
— Balroop Singh, Sublime Shadows Of Life
The woman desires the bad boy that is only good for her and the man desires the good girl that is only naughty for him.﻿
— R.A.Delmonico
God desires to teach us how to submit to others and how to take the second place
— Sunday Adelaja
Nothing is left of meEach time I see her
— Catullus
God’s desire is that Christians would not just be believers in word but He wants everyone who looks at us to see him in us
— Sunday Adelaja
At that moment, there was nothing in the entire damn world I wanted more than her. And it felt like there was nothing else I would ever wanted. It was insane and I'm taking it for the warning it was.I need to stay away from her.
— Elizabeth O'Roark, Waking Olivia
God has a need one that only mankind can fulfil
— Sunday Adelaja
The desire of God is an expression of his need
— Sunday Adelaja
To fulfil the insatiable desire of God is to fit in into his need
— Sunday Adelaja
For your heart to be filled with God’s love is to forgive easily
— Sunday Adelaja
Life is what it is...And even without having everything you desire...It is still gloriously beautiful...
— Virginia Alison
To be a part of the kingdom you need to desire it enough to search it out
— Sunday Adelaja
He'd bet his right nut her skin would taste as good as it smelled.
— Kelly Moran, Tracking You
Some are in tune with the swanky, but not in tune with themselves. Their desire has become the desire of the others ('''Buying now. Dying later''')
— Erik Pevernagie
... Desire baffles knowledge and power.
— Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks
Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning.
— Patricia Highsmith, Carol
The most futile cry of man is his impossible wish to be understood
— Arun Joshi, Strange Case of Billy Biswas
I had possessed her - and she never knew it.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Nothing lasts forever,' Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.'Except maybe for love,' Ben said.'And desire,' Beverly said.
— Stephen King, It
Yes, God has given us desire. But we are the ones that stoke it. What sort of kindling will we be using to make our fire?
— Keturah Lamb
I feared that if I let him, it would be the final push over a ledge I had been precariously hovering on since the day I had first laid eyes on him.
— Nicole R. Locker, Tragedy and Desire
Even though the desire is strong doesn't mean you deserve it.
— Naman Rastogi
A person is bound to experience troubling doubts when attempting to forge a viable philosophy for living. When we are young, the world appears as a dream, no desire is unattainable, and no goal is impossible. We do not entertain the notion that the world will blunt our passionate aspirations, we assume that the world will yield to our resolute will. Misfortune, poverty, illness, and death crush a person’s hopes, awakening us to parts of oneself and the world that we previously denied. When fate has spoken harshly we initially feel ruined, life appears as a bleak wasteland. We must then chose to accept a misery ridden existence or rally the courage and fortitude to turn our thoughts from bitterness and regrets, surrender vain notions that we are somehow special and immune from the terrors of a life when reality does not care a wit for our survival.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Dear Love'Just hold me tight for a while before sunrise before I die.
— Ravikant Mahto
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills in the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation in its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Start maximising what you have, instead of worrying what you don’t have.
— Tony Curl, Seriously Simple Stuff to Get You Unstuck
Even dead, Scarlett seemed able to graft my thoughts onto yearnings a gentleman should never ever contemplate. But then again, no gentleman had ever lived a night wrapped in her cool limbs, savouring such sordid and delightful affections as I had. Scarlett’s attentions had raised me above God, but so help me, in no time she had thrown me down to the devil. And then the killings had begun.
— Cheryl R Cowtan, Girl Desecrated
Trust that you have everything you need right now to be successful financially. All it takes to bring out your natural, God-given gifts is your desire, determination, and a deep faith that you have a genius and a gift that is unique.
— Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom
We're bound by our desire to be right.
— Piyush Shrivastav
I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire disgusts me.
— Richard Siken, War of the Foxes
The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly is always the love that is not returned.
— Ann Patchett
I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I've made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh.
— Mark  Lawrence, King of Thorns
I can't stand how much like my dreams you smell; it's torture. You are torture. You wear metal on your skin like you're made of it, and it bites at me every time you're around. No matter how many showers I take, I smell your scent on me, on this ship, while I'm trying to sleep. I don't understand it, and can't stand it. I can't stand how I want you so badly and don't at the same time, because you're what I've been looking for, and I don't know what it means to have found it.
— Jacqueline Koyanagi, Ascension
Because all the waters of the ocean won't fill a bucket with a hole in it. And that's their fall, and that's their fellowship. Desire. The hole in the bucket: the gulf of yearning into which the soul empties itself.
— Mike Carey, Lucifer, Book One
Desire never stops. Equilibrium is temporary. The self-revelation is never simple, and it cannot guarantee the hero a satisfying life from that day forward. since a great story is always a living thing, its ending is no more final and certain than any other part of the story.
— John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
Over-thinking, a devouring monster,entice, only the inky reflections;there's a pleasure you come by,from this anomalous encounter;kills your desire, for human affection.
— Kashish Gurung
The myth is strong, because the need is strong.
— Jerry B. Brown
Let me leave you with this thought, written by my father before he died. If you incorporate it into your system of values, it will serve as a worthy guide to the management of your sexual energy: Strong desire is like a river. As long as it flows within the banks of God’s will—be the current strong or weak—all is well. But when it overruns those boundaries and seeks its own channels, then disaster lurks in the rampage below.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
She is his word his love she brings the blood back to his lips.
— Gwen Calvo
A man's weakest spots are almost always closest to his passions.
— Auliq Ice
Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Aliganaya - 'the embraceduring an intoxicated walk'or 'sudden arousalwhile driving over speed bumps
— Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
We are playing with desires that disappear.
— Doug Rice, An Erotics of Seeing: The force of photography as philosophy's broken sentence
You can't please all men, but you must desire to please God and love Him forever more.
— Bamigboye Olurotimi
When my desiregrows too fierceI wear my bed clothesinside out,dark as the night’s rough husk.
— Ono no Komachi, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan
I want him everywhere. I burn for him in places he hasn't even touched.
— Amanda Bouchet, A Promise of Fire
...love must feel the ego of the beloved person as important as one's own ego, and must realize the other's feelings and wishes as though they were one's own.
— Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
Life is no more than the repeated fulfilling of a permanent desire.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Lady of the Camellias
You think you know what you want and how it's all supposed to turn out. When all is said and done, you get what you need. You know in the end that what you need is what you really wanted all along.
— Kate McGahan
You're only as old as your boy toy...
— Vanessa Kincaid
When your heart becomes the grave of your secret, that desire of your will be gained more quickly.
— Jalaluddin Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings
And somewhere amidst the storm raging inside, between the twilight of lust and desire, entwined within the whirlwind of swirling emotions, it happened. In one lightning strike, the illusion crumbled. For I realised the naked truth...
— Virginia Alison
Tonight, can we just pretend you want me to?
— N'Zuri Za Austin
Human nature is seldom at a loss to find or create an excuse for pursuing the predominant bias of inclination.
— Helen Craik, Stella of the North
I just don't understand why those who fail to listen to others possess a habitual desire to be listened to.
— Gugu Mona
Sometimes you risk all for a chance at your heart's desire...
— K.J. Kilton, Faulty Family
The ways your desire could humiliate you.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
I would like to see you. But: I would only like to see you with your feeling space, and desire, the parents of bravery, and curiosity. I would like you to want to see me without you feeling seduced or pressured. I would like to see you without our playing games: for games are for winners and losers and I do not ever want to win against you, or for you to lose against me, and I do not want to lose against you or for you to win against me. For we are part of the whole, the main, as Donne said—and your gain is mine and my loss is yours. Love is about finding one’s match, which means we shall touch our minds and hearts together at once, and never condescend or aim for any goal between us but the truth.
— Waylon H. Lewis, Things I Would Like To Do With You
It is shallow desires which make a young man bold
—  strong desires confound him.
You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.
— Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Making love with you Is like drinking sea water. The more I drink The thirstier I become, Until nothing can slake my thirst But to drink the entire sea.
— Kenneth Rexroth, The Love Poems of Marichiko
But show me just this one thing, my darling, i seek a heart stained like a poppy flower.
— Fatima Bhutto, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon
Never say never or it becomes a vice, and there you have it, you just did it twice.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, Pierrot Love: When A Call From The Other Side Takes Its Own Side
The source of love, as I learned later, is a curiosity which, combined with the inclination which nature is obliged to give us in order to preserve itself. […] Hence women make no mistake in taking such pains over their person and their clothing, for it is only by these that they can arouse a curiosity to read them in those whom nature at their birth declared worthy of something better than blindness. […] As time goes on a man who has loved many women, all of them beautiful, reaches the point of feeling curious about ugly women if they are new to him. He sees a painted woman. The paint is obvious to him, but it does not put him off. His passion, which has become a vice, is ready with the fraudulent title page. ‘It is quite possible,’ he tells himself, ‘that the book is not as bad as all that; indeed, it may have no need of this absurd artifice.’ He decides to scan it, he tries to turn over the pages—but no! the living book objects; it insists on being read properly, and the ‘egnomaniac’ becomes a victim of coquetry, the monstrous persecutor of all men who ply the trade of love.You, Sir, who are a man of intelligence and have read these least twenty lines, which Apollo drew from my pen, permit me to tell you that if they fail to disillusion you, you are lost—that is, you will be the victim of the fair sex to the last moment of your life. If that prospect pleases you, I congratulate you
— Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, Vols. I & II
It is not given to each of usTo be desired.
— Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid, in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it.
— Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.
— Charles Frazier, Thirteen Moons
My desire to see as much of the world as I could started with these stars.
— Cathy Maxwell, You And No Other
the heart is an organ of fire
— Michael Ondaatje
Every man shall find his own desire
—  there is no one thing which pleases all: one man gathers thorns and another roses.
I am wild, untameable, the storm and the eye withinAn unpredictable gypsy, with passion beyond your wildest dreamsand unquenchable desiresfor you and you alone...Persistent and fiercely loyal, today I choose to be all of theseand more…Will you still be here tomorrow?
— Virginia Alison
Delight in your sensuality, in the dance of your desires. Don't be ashamed of it.
— Marty Rubin
I’ve pressed sofar away frommy desire thatif you askedme what Iwant I would,accepting the harmoniouscompletion of thedrift, say annihilation,probably.
— A.R. Ammons, Brink Road
runaway my phantom bride and take your bouquet of poisonous flowers float away specter and take the rest of my desire
— A.P. Sweet, The Abattoir of Silence
The source of evil is desire, greed, and anger.
— Aleksandra Layland, Of Wisdom and Valor: The Art of War. The Path of Peace.
Desire without action will collapse all hope built inside.
— K. Weikel, The One-Hundred: Part 2 - The Beneath
They have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man's desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way.
— Wilbur Smith, The Leopard Hunts in Darkness
Sometimes the best things for us aren't necessarily the things we want.
— Sara Farizan
Without the will or desire to achieve one is like flotsam on the oceans of time.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
sometimes all we can crave is a heavenly place with no one around
— shivangi lavaniya
Human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know.
— David Brooks
Desire is easy to fight. Especially when the only weapon desire possesses is attraction. It's not so easy when you're trying to win a war against the heart.
— Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday
Without the wetness of your love,The fragrance of your water,Or the trickling sounds ofYour voice,I shall always feelthirsty.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.
— Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith
There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall also know what I love here. Fear has always guided me toward what I desire. And because I desire, I fear. Often it was fear that took me by the hand and led me. Fear leads me to danger. And everything I love is risky.
— Clarice Lispector
It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.
— Gilles Deleuze
Anything that you could possibly imagine is already out there in another universe. If you are open to it, you can tap into all other realities for knowledge, strength, courage or whatever you need or desire.
— Russell Anthony Gibbs, The Six Principles of Enlightenment and Meaning of Life
And there was born that so mysterious thing that we call 'love' between man and woman; the thing that transcends, uplifts, indeed is the sole enoblement of our act of lust.
— Bryan Islip, So What?
What differentiates humans from all other creatures is the deep and unquenching desire to be appreciated.
— Jeffrey Fry
...there was no point in sighing after what I could not have. It only distracted me from what I did have.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin
She thinks of him lying there, the beautiful moment never arriving, never ruined, never disappointing, over. It must be sublime dwelling in that house of longing, forever poised on desire’s trembling tip, before everything is wrecked.
— Susan  Johnson, My Hundred Lovers
What if someone had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer? What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering? There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don't coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?
— Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill 2
Why does the forbidden always add that edge of sweetness?
— Robin Hobb, City of Dragons
Persistent effort is what will create the life you most desire.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
Create or attract through focused desire the things you wish for in life.
— Steven Redhead, Unleash The Power of Your Heart and Mind
Our deepest (and fastest) yearnings can be tempered by reason and experience
—  our more prudent judgments softened by desire and need.
And Chris remembers: what they used to talk about was desire. Impossible, longing dreams. Delirious, aching confusion. That was the vital element they lived off … because it was the one thing that mattered. Not things, or achievements, or politics, or fracking or anything else: just sweet naked blameless unending desire.
— Paul Russell, Immaculate Blue
The desires you aspire to need strong chains of intent.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
Always ensure to keep focus on what you desire and not what others want you to focus upon.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
Desire changes its character by 180 degrees. Often, when first aroused, it is felt as the desire to have. The desire to touch is, partly, the desire to lay hands on, to take. Later, transformed, the same desire becomes the desire to be taken, to lose oneself within the desired. From these two opposed moments come one of the dialectics of desire; both moments apply to both sexes and they oscillate. Clearly the second moment, the desire to lose oneself within, is the most abandoned, the most desperate, and it is the one that Caravaggio chose (or was compelled) to reveal in many of his paintings.
— John Berger
If all of her was not enough for him, then let him have none of her and seek what he needed elsewhere.
— Robin Hobb, City of Dragons
...some secrets beg to be betrayed. The secret of undeclared love is like that.
— Robin Hobb, Golden Fool
She was everything he'd ever wanted in a woman, and nothing he'd ever thought to find in a lady.
— Eloisa James, My American Duchess
desires are not killed by fulfilling them
— Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
He was hers. To have and hold. Not forever, maybe--not forever, for sure--and not figuratively. But literally. And now. Now, he was hers. And he wanted her to touch him. He was like a cat who pushes its head under your hands.
— Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
JFK had to act before his fragile body betrayed him.
— David Pietrusza, 1960--LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies
A stethoscope hears not the beating of a heart’s desire.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
Look at the picture, Emma. Do you see his expression? He looks like he’s been waiting his whole life to find you and suddenly there you are.
— Sarah Grimm, Wrecked
I figured out that I'm better off not explaining how and why I do the things that I do. If people can only read the surface of what you are, and that's all they want to see, let them see just what they need to see. Everything more is just something to keep and share only with the people that desire and are ready to receive that information. Words wasted on ears that do not listen and eyes that do not see are just seeds thrown on rocky ground. Prepare your ground first and then ask for the seeds.
— Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache
I think now we are simply strangers with some memories.
— Tan Redding, A Banquet Of Crumbs
Man, by thinking, can bring into his experience whatsoever he desires--if he thinks correctly, and becomes a living embodiment of his thoughts. This is not done by holding thoughts but by knowing the Truth.
— Ernest Holmes
All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction.
— Adam Phillips
I realized that in refusing to take a vow man was drawn into temptation, and that to be bound by a vow was like a passage from libertinism to a real monogamous marriage. 'I believe in effort, I do not want to bind myself with vows' is the mentality of weakness and betrays a subtle desire for the thing to be avoided. Or where can be the difficulty in making a final decision? I vow to flee from the serpent which I know will bite me, I do not simply make an effort to flee from him. I know that mere effort may mean certain death. Mere effort means ignorance of the certain fact that the serpent is bound to kill me. The fact, therefore, that I could rest content with an effort only means that I have not yet clearly realized the necessity of definite action. 'But supposing my views are changed in the future, how can I bind myself by a vow?' Such a doubt often deters us. But that doubt also betrays a lack of clear perception that a particular thing must be renounced. That is why Nishkulanand has sung: 'Renunciaton without aversion is not lasting.' Where therefore the desire is gone, a vow of renunciation is the natural and inevitable fruit.
— M.K Gandhi
Calina studied Nessa’s profile in the dim light of dawn. Her pulse raced as she formed a question in her mind. “Who do you want to be bothered by?”Calina felt like anything could happen in the silence that followed. It wrapped around Nessa and her, stifling the breath from her body and tightening her throat.Nessa shifted and turned so she was facing Calina. It was too dark for Calina to see Nessa’s eyes, but she could feel them wandering over her face.“You.” The word was exhaled from Nessa as if a great relief had washed over her. “I want to be bothered by you.
— Heather McVea, November's End
I want you. And I usually get what I want. I had to wait too long to have you already.
— Kelly Moran, Exposure
. . . there are two types of fighters, the former strike all over the place hoping one would land, the latter, assured of their prowess and capabilities, hit once and destroy the opponent's desire to continue the fight
— Soke Behzad Ahmadi
For once desire is articulated in words it does not sit still, but displaces, drifting metonymically from one thing to the next. Desire is a product of language and cannot be satisfied with an object.
— Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique
How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It’s like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud.
— Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly
Desire is easy to fight. Especially when the only weapon desire possess is attraction. It's not so easy when you're trying to win a war against the heart.
— Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday
A man and a woman wanting each other is by far one of the least sinful things I've seen
— Sierra Simone, Priest
When had I tamed myself? It had been a lengthy apprenticeship, begun when I was as young as ten, and continued relentlessly throughout my adolescence, when I had discovered to my own terror that I wanted to murder somebody: my father, a sarcastic friend, my professor of Latin and Greek, even a rude passerby. It was not until I was almost twenty that I began to suspect that, along with the repression of my violent impulses, I had repressed everything, even my ability to experience a profound emotion, even my impulse to do good deeds and help others. I had become as good as I had hoped to be, but good with the cautious detachment of one who never indulges in excess.
— Domenico Starnone, First Execution
This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.
— Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories
Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
Desire inspires us to be our very best.
— Lynn Cullen, Mrs. Poe
Stats don't measure an athlete's hunger.
— Khang Kijarro Nguyen
If you are what you eat, then why aren’t you what you desire?"Desire stands in the great no-man’s land of human activity: the zone of most conflict, fear, and anxiety. It scares us. We are often asked to hate it—by those who claim to have given it up for “better” things, and who often, hypocritically, haven’t.
— Perry Brass
The essence of desire is to have no essential goal. Truly to desire, we must have recourse to people about us; we have to desire their desires.
— René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.
— Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno
I'm a pusher dealing hope, at the intersection of Desire and Despair.
— John Mark Green
But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.
— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
My biggest question was how to get rid of desire while going after your dreams? Dreams are desire in some way, shape or form. My answer is go after your dreams but don't get lost in your actions by staying present as often as possible.
— Matthew Donnelly
The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.
— Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World
...wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
and yet…' he said, 'and yet, father, I am terribly afraid. I am afraid that the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire.''they will be very unlike the things you imagine. But you already know that the objects which your desire imagines are always inadequate to that desire. Until you have it, you will not know what you wanted.
— C.S. Lewis
Personal Responsibility is the individual desire to be in charge or in control of an action or situation.
— Sunday Adelaja
I wanted so much from her. I wanted her to help me understand the erratic and irrational way she made me feel. I wanted her to tell me why I could hardly breathe. I felt like I was drowning every time I saw her, yet I refused to look away. I wanted her to smile at me. I wanted her to keep me a prisoner of her captivating eyes for a little longer. I wanted her to lean closer to me for reasons I couldn't comprehend. I wanted her to stay here with me even though she made me so dangerously weak. I wanted so much from her, but more than anything, I wanted to know her.
— P.I. Alltraine, Heartbound
Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.
— Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
Everything breaks down but desire. And because we are old, doctors try to shame that out of us. Young punks! Lose one's youth, and doctors take it as axiomatic that you've lost your mind, your balls.
— Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues
The only freedom that lasts comes from pursuing what we want when we want what we ought.
— John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy
And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us.
— Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Now, it so happens that our culture—or lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis—places a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture’s emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself.
— Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
Desire isn’t appeased by its object, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense.
— Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory); and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating.
— Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I do. I choose you, which is to choose him and the others and t
— Jameson Fitzpatrick
God desires to use every believer to spread his kingdom everywhere in a grand manner.
— Sunday Adelaja
If you are a believer you are not supposed to begin to convince God to use you. God already desires to use you.
— Sunday Adelaja
God so much desires to use you that he isn't thinking of using you just anyhow or somehow.
— Sunday Adelaja
God desires to use you is to use you in the best possible fashion.
— Sunday Adelaja
God desires to use you to the best of your capacity, to the best of your ability.
— Sunday Adelaja
God desires to use you to the best of your to the best of your potentials.
— Sunday Adelaja
If you don't need what you really want, you can barely want what you really need.
— Olaotan Fawehinmi, The Soldier Within
The water of such a nation (living godly) will not fail. Talking of harmony between the people of the land and nature. Natural catastrophes and disasters shall be far from such a people. There shall be rain in its time, sun in its time. Nature will respond adequately to the needs and desires of such a people.
— Sunday Adelaja
Anyone that does not wish or desire to stretch himself will get nowhere in this life. That is just the way life is.
— Sunday Adelaja
There are so many ways of classifying our tendencies, but I think one of the most telling must be this: there are those of us who do not wrestle very often or for very long with our appetites, who can simply say, Enough, and walk away, and those of us who are constantly at odds with how much we desire and what we actually allow ourselves. The gay between desire and restraint: here rages the river of discontent, one that often threatens to overflow its banks.
— Christine Sneed, Paris, He Said
Flavor factories churn out chemical desire. We spray, squirt, and inject hundreds of millions of pounds of those chemicals on food every year, and then we find ourselves surprised and alarmed that people keep eating. We have become so talented at soaking our food in fakeness that the leading cause of preventable death - smoking - bears a troubling resemblance to the second leading cause of preventable death - obesity.
— Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
She was asked, “What do you see in him?”Taken aback, she replied, “What does he see in me?”Others too wondered why she chose him – not as handsome as the others, not one with a lot of possessions or even status, but little did they know, as little minds go, that she chose the one who wanted her most.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Women are the desire behind all dreams.
— Debasish Mridha
Living according to God's standards is an acquired taste.
— Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith
The cook says, ‘As a young lass, I thought nothing as important as the love of a brave and ‘andsome man; now I’m an old crone, I know full well that it is, but only when he’s moneyed enough to keep you. The young may think they can live on sweet embraces but they won’t fill your belly – or not as you may be intending at any rate!
— Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club
He is a man-beast, carnivore incarnate, motivated by carnal avarice and wearing only the mask of civility. She could sip from that cup. It is his presumption that deters her: his belief that he has already caught Maud in his paw.
— Emmanuelle de Maupassant, The Gentlemen's Club
What a woman tells her lover in desireshould be written out on air & running water.
— Catullus, I Hate and I Love
Goodness is funny because it draws you to it while curiously possessing you with the untrammelled desire to turn it into something bad.
— Sophie Villalobos
God has unlimited resources. Ask him for what you desire.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
That’s not why I’m here. I’ve got a mission. I made a promise.” His chest expanded with a deep, ragged breath. “Ah, hell. Quit looking at me like you either want to shoot me or eat me up. I’m trying to do the right thing here.” Max’s rejection instantly sent her back to the times in her relationship with Richard when he’d rebuffed her advances. “I wasn’t very good, was I? I’m sor—” “Do not let that man come between us.” Max swiped his hand over his mouth and jaw and spun away. Just as quickly he faced her again and grabbed her wrist. “You call me whatever crass SOB you want to.” He pulled her hand to the front of his jeans and cupped it over the unmistakable warm bulge behind his zipper. “This is what you do to me. I don’t know why you and me fit together this good. If I could take you to bed right now and finish this, I would.” He released her and backed away, raising his hands in apology. “But that’s not what I’m here for. Neither one of us needs that kind of complication in our lives. I have to keep the mission in mind. I’m a cop. I have to think like a cop, not a...” “Not a what?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. But he didn’t fill in the blank. “It’s not your job to deal with me. I’m damaged goods, Rosie. You can do better than me.
— Julie Miller, Kansas City Secrets
Increase is a natural desire
— Sunday Adelaja
Your desire for increase is a sign that we are alive
— Sunday Adelaja
Will is a gift from God, desire from the devil.
— James Rozoff, Stories Light And Dark: Ten Short Stories
Love is giving without desiring, it's giving without requiring, but know that it will be returned. Maybe not as expected, but as needed
— Gerald  Mills
Increase must become your natural desire
— Sunday Adelaja
It wasn't a glorious or grand act of misadventure but it was a start. It wasn't what I should have done but it was what I truly wanted to do.
— S.A. Tawks, Misadventurous
If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.
— André Maurois
I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands...—I want you like an animal...or a whore.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
For a control freak, love and the desire to control others are synonymous. Once they lose control over the object of their desire, hostility takes over in full force.
— Natalya Vorobyova
I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands...I want you like an animal...or a whore.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
When they lay in bed together it was—as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded—an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension. It was tense as electricity, the force fed on resistance, rushing through wires of metal stretched tight; it was tense as water made into power by the restraining violence of a dam. The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Life has a time limit. And we are changing all the time. So are our ambitions, desires, and purposes . . . The important thing is to find something that never changes in you.
— Fumio Obata, Just So Happens
And she thought, with a vicious thrill, of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another’s body but only of one’s own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
We all are striving for something every minute of the day, whether we realize it or not.
— Tim Hiller, Strive: Life is Short, Pursue What Matters
Spirituality is about what we do about the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros.
— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Desire is the straw that stirs the drink.
— Ronald Rolheiser
Forget 'bout your past and forget 'bout your resources, make you eligible to any of your desire.
— Shailesh Mishra
God’s desire is to reveal Himself to everyone, yet He will manifest Himself only to those who love Him.
— Sunday Adelaja
You have to watch them all the time,’ she assured me darkly. ‘Even if the spirit’s willing, the flesh is weak!
— Trisha Ashley, Good Husband Material
Desire is a frightening thing.
— Sōseki Natsume, Sanshirō
You may be a person I admire, but you can't be a person that everyone admires. You are not everyone's favourite, but you are someone's favourite whether you like them or not.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Let me say that whoever invented wanting, whoever came up with desire, whoever had the first one and let us all catch it like a hot-pink plague, I would like to tell that person that it wasn't fair of him or her to unleash such a thing upon the world without leaving us a warranty or at the very least an instruction manual about how to manage, how to live with, how to understand this thing that can happen in a person against her will, by which I mean desire and the need it gnaws in us and the shadow it leaves when it's gone.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing