63 Obsession Quotes

My experience is that it's precisely the ones who don't know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.

Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night... Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees.

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.

The importance that our society attaches to sport is incredible. After all, is football a game or a religion? The people of this country have allowed sports to get completely out of hand.

I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.

In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.

He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death.

It is the mark of a mean, vulgar and ignoble spirit to dwell on the thought of food before meal times or worse to dwell on it afterwards, to discuss it and wallow in the remembered pleasures of every mouthful. Those whose minds dwell before dinner on the spit, and after on the dishes, are fit only to be scullions.

All those reports that I sleep in my closet. I don't know how people get that. People are so obsessed with what you do at home.

I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.

Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death. (p. 148)

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Luxury spreads its ample board before their eyes; but they are excluded from the banquet. Plenty revels over the fields; but they are starving in the midst of its abundance: the whole wilderness has blossomed into a garden; but they feel as reptiles that infest it.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.

A man who devotes himself to this pursuit, body and soul, can scarcely fail to become rich. Very little brains will do:

He can eat, talk, sleep and drink football, and then come back for more.

My hero keeps coming up with these elaborately justified schemes. He's delusional. He does redouble his efforts when he loses sight of his aims.

Ever since I was young I have been obsessed with music. To me it's like a puzzle. It's like a Rubik's cube. If I were sitting here talking to you and there was music in the background, I would kind of pretend to listen to you, but I would be focused on, 'I bet that's an 18 inch kick drum and that's kind of an interesting drum move that they have going.' It's a part of my mind that borders on having an obsessive compulsive disorder. Music, at some point in my life, became like my religion. I looked at it as something that was more than just a vinyl disk or more than a poster on a wall. It was something that opened me up and made me believe in other things.

I don't want to make any huge generalisations about women, I'm not here to do that, it's- it's vulgar. But all I'll say is that they have no feelings. Because it's actually men, you'll find, who are the far more romantic. Men are the people you will hear say, 'I've found somebody. She's amazing. If I don't get to be with this person, I'm fucked. I can't carry on, no I mean it, she's totally transformed my life. I have a job, I have a flat, it means nothing. I can't stand it, I have to be with her. Because if I don't, I going to end up in some bedsit, I'll be alcoholic, I'll have itchy trousers. I can't- I can't walk the streets any more.' That, is how women feel about shoes.

This extremely interesting girl, after giving me a single glance from her beautiful eyes, stubbornly refused to look at me again. My vanity at once made me think that it was only so that I would be at full liberty to study her impeccable beauty. It was on this girl that I instantly set my sights, as if all Europe were only a seraglio provided for my pleasures.

Somebody was here the other day from BBC Radio. It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.

I can't not write. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I know it.

Caringosity killed the Kerouac cat.

'Are those non-fat muffins! Are they non-fat?' (Fun With Dick and Jane)

This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world.

Sweet and gentle and sensitive man With an obsessive nature and deep fascination For numbers And a complete infatuation with the calculation Of ?.

He does love his numbers And they run, they run, they run him In a great big circle In a circle of infinity 3.14159 26535897932 3846 264 338 3279...

The regular division of the plane into congruent figures evoking an association in the observer with a familiar natural object is one of these hobbies or problems...I have embarked on this geometric problem again and again over the years, trying to throw light on different aspects each time. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if this problem had never occurred to me; one might say that I am head over heels in love with it, and I still don't know why.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper-whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.