Want Quotes

“UNDERBELLY


Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone
until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either
so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear
and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it
another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes
I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you
to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.

Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure
you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t

die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even
soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually.

Here is how one might start: Before. The truth?
I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove.

Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look
at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid

history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved
it or what it was like before: my unscarred body

visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove,
I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars.

I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how
I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story:

I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise
to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map

of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream.
Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove

do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing?
I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.

My truth is: blade. My hands

on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands
carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous

memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands
because they are like mine. Holding a knife

by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation
to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid

we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be.

The truth is: I have made fire
before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened

this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered
before: flesh

against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.”
― Nicole Homer

“Both the wanting and the wanter are thoughts.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“When I want to do a thing I always can do it.”
― Brothers Grimm

“Choose something big that you think it’s really not okay to want, something you think would make you seem greedy or selfish if you asked for it. And make sure it’s something you really do want. Then ask for it. Whether you get it or not, fight your impulse to apologize or feel bad. Tell yourself it’s okay to want what you want. Combat the impulse to scale back out of fear that you’re overreaching.”
― Linda Babcock, Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want

“Later these thoughts would come back to haunt me, though I could not have anticipated that your compulsion to manhandle your unruly, misshapen experience into a tidy box, like someone trying to cram a wild tangle of driftwood into a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, as well as this sincere confusion of the is with the ought to be—your heartrending tendency to mistake what you actually had for what you desperately wanted—would produce such devastating consequences.”
― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

“A wish, need and want walk into a bar. Only the need gets served.”
― Rajesh`

“I am not kissing her because I want to, and I am not kissing her because I need to - I am kissing her for a reason that transcends want and need, that feels elemental to our existence, a molecular component on which our universe will be.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“…it is easier to think about hating people than about wanting them.”
― Katie Hale, My Name is Monster

“Be ready to walk away. Remember, you only want this deal, you do not need this deal.”
― Jim Camp, Start with NO...The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don't Want You to Know

“I don't want someone to make me happy,
I want someone to build happiness with me.”
― Augusto Branco

“Those who live on crumbs are pigeons and mice.
I want all the love!”
― Augusto Branco

“Messages we get about menopause more often tell us we must keep ourselves from much of what we want and need in this time. It's easy to get the idea that life in and after menopause is going to be little, dreary rituals of desperate maintenance and exacting control over food, exercise, the shape and size of our bodies, our skin, our intimate relationships, our sexuality, our leisure, our moods, robbing us of what pleasure we might have found in these things before.”
― Heather Corinna, What Fresh Hell Is This?: Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You

“My greatest enemy is not the person who tells me what I ‘need’ to hear, although we are quick to label them as such. Rather, my greatest enemy is the person who tells me what I ‘want’ to hear, for this is the person who has determined to partner with me in my own destruction.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“if you want peace of mind. do what you need instead of what you want.”
― Santosh Kumar Pyasa

“There's nothing safer than wanting nothing. But being safe in that way, I've come to know, does not inure you to illness, pain, and death. Sometimes the only thing it saves is face.”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Do not force people of wanting you because they might accept you for a short of period and they will leave you consequently.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“Someday, when you're old, you'll see the the ones who came to kill us and the ones who'll run to save us are the same. No matter their pretenses, the all arrive here believing they have the power to take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.”
― Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were

“But I think there's something inside of us, something that blooms in us in adolescence and never leaves...and it's just...*want*. [...]
Some people work to minimize it with mindfulness and meditation; some people let it grow and run free and take over their lives. But some people, and I consider myself one of them, study their want, refine it, and build an engine that burns it. Even if their want pushes all in one direction, they can tack against it like a sailboat, getting somewhere better than where they *wanted* to be.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Fight for what you want and what you feel you deserve.”
― Anonymous

“As a consultant, a new client will tell you what they want...your job is to deliver what they need.”
― Bobby Darnell, Time For Dervin - Living Large In Geiggityville

“Ask myself the most fundamental and powerful question: What is it that I want?”
― Trevor Moawad, It Takes What It Takes: How to Think Neutrally and Gain Control of Your Life

“The difference between what we want and what we are able to do emerges with the slow, poisonous crawl of grief. The hunger doesn’t abate, it seems; it only eats you up.”
― Jonathan Kemp, Twentysix

“I am tired, but not exhausted. And at least part of me still wants something more.”
― Scott Carney, What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

“Don't throw out the old year until you decide that this is the new year that you want.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“The son changed the focus from the negative (“Sell the house”) to the positive (“Try this new arrangement for six weeks”). In other words, don’t just tell the other to stop doing something you don’t want; ask them to start doing something you do want.”
― William Ury, The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes

“The things that you desire with ‘all of your heart’ will likely be the things that you will find along the way to the thing that you thought you desired with ‘all of your heart.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Some people want to be exactly where you are,
but they don't want to pay the price you paid
to be where you are.”
― Augusto Branco

“I want to find someone
who, seeing that my love has fallen and broken,
doesn't throw it away,
but who, with affection, picks up the pieces
and helps me fix it.”
― Augusto Branco

“You do what you want but happens what I want. You do what I want and will happen what you want.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Krishna Crux

“If you don't want to be my friend,
then I don't need you.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity