"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
— Jack Kerouac

"None of us can choose where we shall love..."
— Susan Kay (Phantom)

"Anyone who is observant, who discovers the person they have always dreamed of, knows that sexual energy comes into play before sex even takes place. The greatest pleasure isn't sex, but the passion with which it is practiced. When the passion is intense, then sex joins in to complete the dance, but it is never the principal aim."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong."
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

"Haven't I? - he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years? ...He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he had never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be said within his own mind. Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her ...Since the first time I saw you ...Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if ...Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed ...You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize your greatness? To think of you as you deserved - as if you were a man? ...Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? The only bright encounter of my life - the only person I respected - the best business man I know - my ally - my partner in a desperate battle ...The lowest of all desires - as my answer to the highest I've met ...Do you know what I am? I thought of it, because it should have been unthinkable. For that degrading need, which would never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you ...I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought : Not I, I couldn't be broken by it ...Since then ...For two years ...With not a moments respite ...Do you know what it's like, to want it? Would you wish to hear what I thought when I looked at you ...When I lay awake at night ...When I hear your voice over a telephone wire ...When I worked, but could not drive it away? ...To bring you down to things you cant conceive - and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean, proud strength - then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which I'll preform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation ...I want you - and may I be damned for it!

- Henry Rearden"
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her to walk home alone, and he wanted to run after her and grab her up before she could take another step."
— Ann Brashares

"You bring out the Mexican in me.
The hunkered thick dark spiral.
The core of a heart howl.
The bitter bile.
The tequila lágrimas on Saturday all
through next weekend Sunday.
You are the one I’d let go the other loves for
surrender my one-woman house.
Allow you red wine in bed,
even with my vintage lace linens.
Maybe. Maybe.
For you.
Quiero ser tuya. Only yours. Only you.
Quiero amarte. Atarte. Amarrarte.
Love the way a Mexican woman loves. Let
me show you . Love the only way I know how."
— Sandra Cisneros (Loose Woman: Poems)

"Lately I can't help wanting us
to be like other people.
For example, if I were a smoker,

you'd lift a match to the cigarette
just as I put it between my lips.
It's never been like that

between us: none of that
easy chemistry, no quick, half automatic
flares. Everything between us

had to be learned.
Saturday finds me brooding
behind my book, all my fantasies

of seduction run up
against the rocks.
Tell me again

why you don't like
sex in the afternoon?
No, don't tell me--

I'll never understand you
never understand us, America's strangest
loving couple: they never

drink a bottle of wine together
and rarely look at each other.
Into each other's eyes, I mean."
— Deborah Garrison (A Working Girl Can't Win : And Other Poems)

"I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone."
— Alexander Poe

"There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined."
— Albert Camus

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
— John Adams

"I want you, Hank. I'm much more of an animal than you think. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you - and the only thing I'm ashamed of is that I did not know it. I did not know why, for two years, the brightest moments I found were the ones in your office, where I could lift my head to look up at you. I did not know the nature of what I felt in your presence, nor the reason. I know it now. That is all I want, Hank. I want you in my bed - and you are free of me for all the rest of your time. There's nothing you'll have to pretend - don't think of me, don't feel; don't care - I do not want your mind, your will, your being or your soul, so long as it's to me you will come for that lowest one of your desires. I am an animal who wants nothing but the sensation of pleasure which you despise - but I want it from you. You'd give up amy height of virtue for it , while I - I haven't any to give up. There's none I seek or wish to reach. I am so low that I would exchange the greatest sight of beauty in the world for the sight of your figure in the cab of a railroad engine. Amd seeing it, I would not be able to see it indifferently. You don't have to fear that you're now dependent on me. It's I who will depend on any whim of yours. You'll have me anytime you wish, anywhere, on any terms. Did you call it the obscenity of my talent? It's such that it gives you a safer hold on me than on any other property you own. You may dispose of me as you please - I'm not afraid to admit it - I have nothing to protect from you and nothing to reserve. You think that this is a threat to your achievement, but it is not to mine. I will sit at my desk, and work, and when the things around me get hard to bear, I will think that for my reward I will be in your bed that night. Did you call it depravity? I am much more depraved than you are: you hold it as your guilt, and I - as my pride. I'm more proud of it than anything I've done, more proud than of building the Line. If I'm asked to name my proudest attainment, I will say: I have slept with Hank Rearden. I had earned it.

- Dagny Taggart."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more then I am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"Your eyes are full of sweetness
Your lips are full of fear
And while your lips breathe:
'Leave me!'
Your eyes cry out: 'Come here!'"
— traditional Spanish copla

"I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You're my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.

--To his mistress, Catherine Walston who inspired The End of the Affair"
— Graham Greene

"The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."
— Oscar Wilde

"Feel your emotions,
Live true your passions,
Keep still your mind."
— geoffrey m. gluckman, 1994

"Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"
— Graham Greene

"Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."
— Werner Herzog

"It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if se adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

"Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment."
— Claude Monet

""Give me your love or I kill you" say a pair of dark eyes'
"Give me your love or I die" say a pair of blue eyes."
— traditional Spanish copla

"...it was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves."
— Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire)

"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Bee to the blossom, moth to the flame; Each to his passion; what's in a name? "
— Helen Hunt Jackson

"Their sudden intimacy was like the explosive combustion that engulfs and consumes a moth that has fluttered too close to a candle flame; a completely unexpected turn of events that took both of them unawares and swept them irresistibly up and out of themselves as it hurled them into each other’s arms."
— Jack Whyte (Uther)

"When given an opportunity, deliver excellence and never quit."
— Robert Rodriguez (Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player)

"I felt for the tormented whirlwinds
Damned for their carnal sins
Committed when they let their passions rule their reason."
— Dante Alighieri

"I loved him as we always love for the first time; with idolatry and wild passion."
— Candide

"Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!"
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"She knew exactly how he was feeling, because experience had taught her that the kind of excitement she was feeling at that moment was never, ever one-sided. On the contrary, she knew that it was born of acute and mutual anticipation, and she knew, too, that it would not be denied."
— Jack Whyte (Uther)

"Life's short. Live passionately."
— Marc A. Pitman

"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)

"It is still news to her that passion
could steer her wrong
though she went down, a thousand times
strung out
across railroad tracks, off bridges
under cars, or stiff
glass bottle still in hand, hair soft
on greasy pillows, still it is
news she cannot follow love (his
burning footsteps in blue crystal
snow) & still
come out all right."
— Diane DiPrima

"When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:
I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading."
— John Adams

"He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"Work is not work when you love what you do.L.C. Sonnenberg"
— Trina

"Work is not work when you love what you do."
— Trina Sonnenberg

"He took her into his arms again, using all his strength to be gentle, and let his lips touch hers so lightly he could hardly feel it."
— Morgan Llywelyn (Lion of Ireland: The Legend of Brian Boru)

"The slaves in Rome were incapable of leisure and so their masters gave them entertainment to keep them pacified.”"
— Oliver DeMille

"...love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.
"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

"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