top of page
.png){kind=small}
"And the women who had thought they wanted dresses never realized that what they had wanted was happiness."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Desire quotes
"Politeness is a desire to be treated politely, and to be esteemed polite oneself."
"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."
"The greatest part of intimate confidences proceed from a desire either to be pitied or admired."
"Without 'Gnan' (True Knowledge of the Self), desire(s) will not go away."
"You need to be greedy or ignorant to truly want to live forever."
"Nothing prevents one from appearing natural as the desire to appear natural."
"Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire."
"He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato."
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
Explore more quotes by John Steinbeck
"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."
"Casy said solemnly, "This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter..."
"But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there."
"...many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu."
"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard."
"We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way."
"Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew-that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds."
"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
bottom of page