"But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream... But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you what you once wanted."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 3: Dream Country)

"Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"When a person truly desires something, all the Universe conspires to help that person realize his dream."
— Paolo Coello (El Alquimista)

"Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need."
— Mick Jagger

"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable."
— Albert Camus

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."
— Roland Barthes

"If you suffer and make your loved ones suffer, there is nothing that can justify your desire."
— Thich Nhat Hanh (The Art of Power)

"Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation"
— Sarah Addison Allen (The Sugar Queen)

"If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great."
— John Piper (A Hunger for God)

"The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing."
— Frank Herbert (Dune)

"Wrote all day—and my story is still incomplete."
— Florence Wolfson

"Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times."
— Niccolò Machiavelli

"Why me?" she asked, holding on to him.

"Because you cared," he whispered. "You cared so much for your people, it broke your heart to see the pack in ruins. You cared so much for your mother, you risked your life for hers. You cared enough to save someone who wanted you dead. And because you walk like a queen."
— Annette Curtis Klause (Blood and Chocolate)

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for."
— Epicurus

"Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You."
— Anne Rice (Pandora)

"Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

"The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie.
It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for
heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not
the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we
drink in every night."
— John Piper (A Hunger for God: Desiring God through Fasting and Prayer)

"There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire"
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Dart)

"free from desire, you realize the mystery
caught in the desire, you see only the manifestations."
— Laozi

"Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us,..."
— Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)

"If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want. "
— Oscar Wilde

"There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too."
— Alison Lurie

"You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it."
— Samuel R. Delany (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand)

"The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires."
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea: 50th Anniversary Edition)

"What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone."
— Robert Allen (The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth)

"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)

"He expected pages and pages of bright pictures of pancakes of every variety shown in plain stacks, or built into castles or bridges or igloos, or shaped like airplanes or rowboats or fire engines. And pitchers of syrup to choose from -- partridge berry syrup, thimbleberry syrup, huckleberry syrup, bosenberry syrup, and raspberry syrup. Then there would be cheese plates and cheeses a la carte. Creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and peculiar little cheeses in peculiar little clay pots."
— Michael Hoeye (Time Stops for No Mouse)

"If I have you for a day, I'll want you for a week. If I have you for a week, I'll want you for another week."
— Michael Stein (In the Age of Love)

"For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

"
— Toni Morrison

"καὶ οὗτος ἄρα καὶ ἄλλος πᾶς ὁ ἐπιθυμῶν τοῦ μὴ ἐτοίμου ἐπιθυμεῖ"
— Plato (The Symposium)

"Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage's arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not... Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen's ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Noir sur Blanc
In many instances, human’s desire is irrefutable
Thus if a truthful effort wouldn’t earn accomplishment,
A dishonest attempt would be more tolerable than expunging his wish
"
— dame trahie

"...It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven--that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Gerdanlouk, he thinks. An evocative Turkish word, with Arabic roots. It means jewelry, but only jewelry adorning a woman between her lower neck and the top of her breasts. Gerdanlouk. He looks away."
— Jenny White (The Sultan's Seal: A Novel)

"A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal that is worth achieving."
— Ayn Rand

"Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion."
— Samuel Johnson

"I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas,
how many yearning thoughts, what great desire,
have lead them through such sorrow to their fate?'"
— Dante Alighieri

"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

"Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum."
— Frederick Douglass

"The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning."
— David Quammen (Wild Thoughts from Wild Places)

"Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires."
— Jean de La Fontaine

"καὶ οὗτος ἄρα καὶ ἄλλος πᾶς ὁ ἐπιθυμῶν τοῦ μὴ ἐτοίμου ἐπιθυμεῖ"
— Plat

"There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted."
— La Rochefoucauld