Desire

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

[ Gollum speaking of the Ring :] Where iss it? Where iss it? . . . Losst it is, my precious, lost, lost! Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!

 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

 

Love’s pleasure lasts but a moment;

 

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

The truly erotic sensibility, in evoking the image of woman, never omits to clothe it. The robing and disrobing: that is the true traffic of love.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

What is an obstacle in our loving men is the love they have for themselves, which is touchy, exclusive, inordinate, tragic. We could never love them as much as that.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still .entangled with the desire for ownership.

Spend all you have for loveliness, / Buy it and never count the cost; / For one white singing hour of peace / Count many a year of strife well lost, / And for a breath of ecstasy / Give all you have been, or could be.

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do so. I do not know, but I feel it, and am in agony.

Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

The tragedy is when you’ve got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.

He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.

 

Da mi basia mille.

 

Love is and was my lord and king.

 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

 

I will drink Life to the lees.

 

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,