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Obsession Quotes

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Obsession Quotes

“You said you didn't love her enough. How did you know in the end that you didn't?" ... "Because when she went away I didn't miss her. Because I could stand having her out of my sight; because I didn't want to touch her every time I saw her; because I didn't have the urge to buy her flowers every time I passed a flower stall; because I didn't look for her around every corner; because she wasn't in my head every time I looked up from a market report; because she didn't make me feel stoned - and didn't make me feel glad I wasn't; she didn't fire up my imagination; she didn't make me forget the gloom of the past, as the song goes. Because she didn't make me almost wish she'd disappear so I could find her.”

“UNMERCIFUL My body was a useless entity. In your presence, it betrayed me. Like dangerous waters beckoning In their mystifying beauty. Their tantalizing fluidity caressed my body As I resisted taking the plunge. My body betrayed me, Ignored me like a preoccupied stranger With a will of its own. And, I cruelly learned, I could control what happened Only if you were merciful. But, watching you, Listening to you, Was not merciful. It was a torturous joy.”

“Now I wanted only one thing, in this room with the smell of Helen's perfume and clothes and the bed and the twilight: to possess her with everything that was in me, and if there was one thing that tormented me and pierced the flat dull sense of loss, it was the realization that nature wouldn't let me possess her even more fully and deeply. If only I could spread myself over her like a blanket, if only I could have had a thousand hands and mouths, if only I could have held her in a perfect concave mold, skin to skin without intervening space—but even then there would be a last regret, for still it would be only skin to skin instead of blood in blood: we could be together, but never completely united.”

“In This Darkness by Stewart Stafford A limo drove through mansion gates, Rock star John saw her wait again, Hysterically begging for autographs, The gates closed behind the limo. John said stop, and exited the car, "I'll sign it for you tomorrow, 100%," "No," she said, "sign tonight... now," He strode towards his home gates. He rummaged in his coat pockets, Ripping a cigarette packet to sign, He found a tiny pencil in his pants, Trailing breath vapour in the night. "I can't see you in this darkness," A chilling laugh from the fan's side, Three muzzle flashes, John died, Contorted on a bloody driveway. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”

“One day, she told me her favorite color was green. Do you know how much green I see in a day? Enough to remember any other color ain’t her favorite. Green. That’s a whole lifetime with a girl whose face emerges on leaves, tennis courts, the billboard on every nearest passion pit, the emerald fabric of my curtains, hotel salads, on a crumpled Washington, and the two forest eyes of my own that look back at me in the mirror and say, “Diana #1, Diana #2.” Ain’t that a bite. One day, I will lay outside to daydream about her for so long, fungi will grow on my pathetic body, plaguing me with her favorite color. Will she love my algae then?”

“And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself. But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...”

“Strength and victory... What he would never praise himself for, but whose loss was his most obsessive fear.”

“As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.”

“It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota -- the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them.”

“Never stand in the way of letting God use people’s actions, in order to solve a greater issue in the world.”

“And when I look around the apartment where I now am,—when I see Charlotte’s apparel lying before me, and Albert’s writings, and all those articles of furniture which are so familiar to me, even to the very inkstand which I am using,—when I think what I am to this family—everything. My friends esteem me; I often contribute to their happiness, and my heart seems as if it could not beat without them; and yet—if I were to die, if I were to be summoned from the midst of this circle, would they feel—or how long would they feel—the void which my loss would make in their existence? How long! Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where he has the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongest and most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish,—vanish,—and that quickly. I could tear open my bosom with vexation to think how little we are capable of influencing the feelings of each other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight which I do not naturally possess; and though my heart may glow with the most lively affection, I cannot make the happiness of one in whom the same warmth is not inherent. Sometimes I don’t understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her! I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing. One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see? And I! Witness, Heaven, how often I lie down in my bed with a wish, and even a hope, that I may never awaken again! And in the morning, when I open my eyes, I behold the sun once more, and am wretched. If I were whimsical, I might blame the weather, or an acquaintance, or some personal disappointment, for my discontented mind; and then this insupportable load of trouble would not rest entirely upon myself. But, alas! I feel it too sadly; I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my own bosom contains the source of all my pleasure. Am I not the same being who once enjoyed an excess of happiness, who at every step saw paradise open before him, and whose heart was ever expanded towards the whole world? And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry; and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life: that active, sacred power which created worlds around me,—it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills, and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists, and illuminating the country around, which is still wrapped in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows, which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to extract one tear of joy from my withered heart,—I feel that in such a moment I stand like a reprobate before heaven, hardened, insensible, and unmoved. Oftentimes do I then bend my knee to the earth, and implore God for the blessing of tears, as the desponding labourer in some scorching climate prays for the dews of heaven to moisten his parched corn.”

“Possession is not only when the devil plays hide and seek in your brain or poison your medula oblongata with negativity, but it is also when you are under the influence of the same specie as you!”

“Language stops being a tool; it becomes a map, not to truth but to the person who wrote it.”

“Of course I could never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes— too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.”