Quotes about Desire

I cannot remember a time when I did not want to go to Africa to study animals.

Then I fall asleep with a stupid feeling of wishing to be different from what I am or from what I want to be; perhaps to behave differently from the way I want to behave or do behave.

Whenever someone comes in from outside, with the wind in their clothes and the cold on their cheeks, I feel like burying my head under the blankets to keep from thinking, "When will we be allowed to breathe fresh air again?

We just wanted to get out of there, to get away and reach our destination in safety. Nothing else mattered.

But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem. I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I'm free, and yet I can't let it show.

I can't keep that up...finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if...there weren't any other people living in the world.

Now I live only for Peter

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs were about.

When I feel like shoveling in food, the emptiness can be filled only with love (April 2012, O Magazine)

I felt that in my strange new friends and in certain new books, I was meeting my other half. Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.