Quotes by American Authors - Page 13

Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.
Theodore Sturgeon
Laura, this isn't love. Love lets you go on a trip without following you. Love can live without you for a week, knowing you'll come back.''No, it can't.' The afternoon shadows grew long and cold. In spite of the chill, a heat rose up inside her and flooded her face. 'That's how you know it's true love. When he can't live without you.'Karen shook her head. 'That's how you know it's obsession. Or something else.
Natalie Standiford
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was anotherappleto slice into pieces.Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon,that meanswe're inconsolable.Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.These our bodies, possessed by light.Tell me we'll never get used to it.
Richard Siken
Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEINGHAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even peopleBEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people
Erich Fromm
Luc blinked innocently. That little fuck. "I gave you a piece of opal and a Luxen to nom-nom on.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
The one thing I do know is that Miki is obsessed with me, maybe in his own fucked up way he loves me. He won’t let me go and in the end that will kill him…- Shi
Rochelle H. Ragnarok
Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.
Timothy Schaffert
The trouble with entering the upper echelon is you have to work harder to stay there.
John Jay Osborn Jr.
Two words from him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I’ll play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it’s time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers wears off layer after layer, because I like doing things for you, will do anything for you, just say the word...
André Aciman
I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t, but if you’ve gone this far I suppose it’s obvious that what was ignited when I loved you continues to burn. But that’s of small importance to you now, and that’s how it should be. Everything is in its place. The past rests, breathing faintly in the darkness. It no longer holds me as it used to; now I must reach back to touch it. It is night and I am alone and there is still time, a moment more. I am standing on a long black stage, with a circle of light on me, which is my love for you, enduring. I have escaped—or have been expelled—from eternity and am back in time. But I step out once more to sing this aria, this confession, this testament without end. My arms open wide, not to embrace you but to embrace the world, the mystery we are caught in. There is no orchestra, no audience; it is an empty theater in the middle of the night and all the clocks in the world are ticking. And now for this last time, Jade, I don’t mind, or even ask if it is madness: I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat.
Scott Spencer
Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon who I have depended upon my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I'd be exponentially more messed up than I am already.
Arlaina Tibensky
Obsession is hard work and can only be performed at full speed for short periods of time.
Raymond L. Atkins
Thomas finally tired of playing with me mentally and moved into phase two of his obsession to rid himself of me. I was informed continually that resistance would be futile, and there was no way to escape
Sara Niles
Loved with obsessive devotion, hated with barely controlled fury.
Heather McCollum
I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would hurt. But you can't pretend they didn't need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn't necessarily have admitted it - except Reza - but you can't tell me they didn't love me. The heart knows. The body knows. When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time passed differently; words or gestures meant more than themselves. If you've never had this experience-but who has not been visited by love, laughing?-then you can't understand. And if you have, you don't need me to say another word.
Claire Messud
Be a little less obsessed with how I live my life and a little more obsessed with how you live your own.
Dan Pearce
I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.
Kij Johnson
In recent months, the emotional aspect has become as necessary to me as the physical. It amuses me, this strange quirk of mine. I want my little captive to love me, to care about me. I want to be more than just the monster of her nightmares.
Anna Zaires
Nothing and no one had ever belonged to him and only him—except Legion. Not that she would do anything necessary to save him, nor would he do anything necessary to save her. But. Yeah, there was always a but with him. He had been her first lover—and he wanted to be her last.
Gena Showalter
It was as if I had only just been able to see colours and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time.
Anne Rice
But the most important thing I know is that I want the possibility of you more than the reality of [her].
Caroline Kepnes
Some men are like that - they get a woman in their mind, and that's that. They will destroy themselves and everyone else over her; they will let everything else fall apart.
Paul Elwork
Lane, I will become attached to you. It happens with everyone. Something about my personality makes me latch on to people. First, it was my friend Tina, then Liam, and now you. I’m sorry, but I know it will happen. It already is happening. Now that we’ve had sex, I don’t want you out of my sight.
K. Webster
I was obsessed. I couldn't stop myself. It was not healthy, but I couldn't stop. I didn't feel like there was anything else in my life to stop for. We all have periods of our life when we're trapped doing something we hate and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime, right? I hope you identify with that idea. It's the only way I can explain becoming so emotionally invested in a video game that I would get in my car and drive around town sobbing if my internet went out.
Felicia Day
I wonder if whoever invented World of Warcraft realizes it’s practice for sociopaths.
Lisa Scottoline
But she just couldn’t stop checking her phone; she wantedto stop, tried to stop, but the pull would not let her go. It wasa strange experience for her to be doing the obsessive phone-checkingthing. Vanessa talked about it, and she had heard storiesabout it from other friends. One date with a guy and suddenlythe phone becomes like an appendage endowed with some superpower to predict your future.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
The rest of the short walk was silent. It was that loud sortof silence where the absence is painful, when there’s so much tosay, but nothing is said.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.
Sherry Turkle
Since chess was such a painful test of intellect, it affected his emotions too much to be sport.
Paul C. Nagel
It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.
Donald Hall
Some never escape from the imprisoning conviction that a cold or unattainable lover can be persuaded to become warm or attainable if they only discover the key.
Jeanne Safer
He talked about her in a way that only the obsessed do. It was always a pressured monologue, and it was always the same. He had to relate every detail, interpreting and seeking meaning in her every utterance or action, like a fundamentalist minutely analyzing a biblical text.
Jeanne Safer
Obsessive love is built on a tissue of illusions: that by having sex with someone you can possess that person's soul; that you can transmute past defeats into present triumphs without understanding or mourning; that you make the unloving love you by constancy, uncomplaining availability, and molding yourself into what you thing that person wants.
Jeanne Safer
They were just boys. Take away the band, the lights, the fame, and the screaming girls, and they were just boys, chosen for us to obsess over.
Goldy Moldavsky
We should bear in mind the supercrip stereotype as a figure obsessively, indeed maniacally, over-compensating for a perceived physical difference or lack, since, as we shall see, this aspect ties in quite neatly with the genre specificities and narratival concerns of so much Silver Age superhero literature.
José Alaniz
They know too well the violent hypnosis of those who hope to possess them-- men who can smell the blood on the places where a woman is breaking.
Alana Massey
Some good shit happens fast (a bestselling book), and some good shit happens slow (love).
Caroline Kepnes
Over and over I played her favorite Arvo Pärt, as a way of being with her; and she had only to mention recently read novel for me to grab it up hungrily, to be inside her thoughts, a sort of telepathy
Donna Tartt
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul.
Vladimir Nabokov
If it weren‘t for Asperger‘s and obsessions there would be no Theory of Relativity, no Magic Flute, no Microsoft…and no Ghost Busters.
Rudy Simone
Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession - or love? Or was it something more unhealthy - a kind of craving, an addiction?
William Boyd
It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell -- a grain of sand that I didn't know was there and didn't particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can't help becoming obsessed with the pearl.
Truman Capote
When others' obsessions are not ours, we are sad for them, and we talk of how empty their lives will be if they don't achieve their empty goal: the gymnastics prize, the firm partnership. But there is a monomania in which it is the focus, the sense of transport, that is the real pleasure.
Alice W. Flaherty
Recognize the signs, these perpetual question and need to control. Never be a part of someone else's obsession. Let them carry it alone, with their snakeskin smile. These are the people that hold their hand out and it’s as cold as their heart.
Ron Baratono
You've invaded my mind and I can't get you out of it," he accused with discernible disdain. She avoided looking at him and said, "Then you should forget." "Forget?" he thundered,"EVERYTHING reminds me of you!" She turned to confront him, slowing lifting her eyes to meet the disgust in his. "That's not my doing," she countered, "That's your doing and you are the only one who can control it.
Donna Lynn Hope
But it is easy to call a man in love a mad man.
Brendan Connell
It's all you think about, all you talk about, and all you want us to talk about. What in the world would we call something like that? Oh, yeah! An obsession!
Maggie Stiefvater
All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it.
Charles Brockden Brown
It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...
Zoë Heller
Mine first --mine last-- mine even in the grave!
Louisa May Alcott
To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.
Edgar Allan Poe
All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.
Mary Roach
and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pch radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and halfthrottled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque, part o nous ne serons jamais spars; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torneven then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov
He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don't love like that anymore. Or maybe it's only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don't know.
Peter S Beagle
The outside world holds no interest for me without you." -Edward
Stephenie Meyer
My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn’t all about me?
Jodi Picoult
Never in my life had I been more frustrated. Go figure it wouldn't be with a human but a freaking alien. At least I now knew that the male species were asses no matter what planet they hailed from.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
Mujer, you own my soul.
Simone Elkeles
It’s not like love at first sight, really. It’s more like… gravity moves. When you see her, suddenly it’s not the earth holding you here anymore. She does. And nothing matters more than her. And you would do anything for her, be anything for her… You become whatever she needs you to be, whether that’s a protector, or a lover, or a friend, or a brother.
Stephenie Meyer
From the first time I saw you, I've belonged to you completely. I still do. If you want me. -Jace
Cassandra Clare