Quotes on Want

Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on "good" rather than on "time".

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

We want to see a struggle. We want to see people falling over but getting themselves back up on their feet, and that's what's extraordinary- ordinary people and their struggle. There's nothing as interesting as real life out your window. You walk down the street for half an hour, I'll give you half an hour of drama.

I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

The gods throw the dice and they don't ask whether we want to be in the game or not.

Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.

I am completely a loner. In my head I want to feel I can be anywhere. There is a sort of recklessness that being a loner allows me.

The FUTURE of this world has long been DECLARED; the final outcome between GOOD and evil is already KNOWN. There is absolutely no question as to who WINS because the VICTORY has already been posted on the SCOREBOARD. The only really strange thing is all of this is that we are still down here on the FIELD trying to decide which TEAM’S JERSEY we want to wear!

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I've met people who don't want to try for fear of failing.

I've wanted one thing for me whole life and I'm not going to be that girl who wants one thing her whole life then gets it and complains.

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.