Laurie Anderson Quotes

Ken Starr has become a prosecutorial Captain Ahab.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him - which had torn his leg out - to the ends of the Earth, no matter what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality.

There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.

I think people have the wrong idea of 'Moby Dick' as this somber, boring thing.

Envy like fire always makes for the highest points.

Whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can't explain this.

No wild enthusiast could rest, till half the world like him was possessed.

Desire then is the invasion of the whole self by the wish, which, as it invades, sets going more and more of the psychical processes; but at the same time, so long as it remains desire, does not succeed in getting possession of the self.

Ambition can be a disease, and it feeds on itself.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

What feeds me destroys me.

The basic human reaction to pleasure is not satisfaction, but rather craving for more. Hence, no matter what we achieve, it only increases our craving, not our satisfaction.

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.

Christopher Nolan's 'The Prestige' is an enthralling study of doubles, doubling and duplicity. Its twinned themes are obsession and the Secret: the Secret as objet-a, that which inspires, but which can never satisfy, obsession.

I can't put my mind to anything else. I'm not interested in hanging out or partying. For me, it's all about the pitch: training, playing. But even when I go home, afterwards, it's football the whole time. I think I'm obsessed!

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging out there like an untucked shirt.

He wanted pain, I saw that in him, and what a man wants he will often manage to find.

The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. Mind looked long at the sticky moon opening in dusk her new wings then decently hanged himself,one afternoon. The last thing he saw was you naked amid unnaked things.

Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back; And is a swelling, and the last affection A high mind can put off; being both a rebel Unto the soul and reason, and enforceth All laws, all conscience, treads upon religion, and offereth violence to nature's self.

Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is a fake and a mockery.

Everyone has a self-destructive nature in them. It's whether you feed it or not. You don't have to be a pop star to feel connected to destruction or self-destruction. But self-destruction is self-obsession, and self-obsession is not really possible if you're engaged in raising children. And if you have a spiritual life, you're constantly being asked to see yourself as one small fragment in the bigger picture.

Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.