Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

I just want some time, Mikhail, to think things through. It’s frightening, the way I am about you. I think about you every minute; I want to touch you, just to know I can, to feel you beneath my fingers. It’s as if you crawled into my head and my heart, even my body, and I can’t get you out.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.

When we begin to desire a thing, to yearn for it with all our hearts, we begin to establish relationship with it in proportion to the strength and persistency of our longing and intelligent effort to realize it.

I've always loved those movies where somebody really wants something, and then the thing they want is right in front of them.

Love is the hardest habit to break, and the most difficult to satisfy.

I want to feel passion, I want to feel pain. I want to weep at the sound of your name. Come make me laugh, come make me cry... just make me feel alive.

The moment I first heard love I gave up my soul, my heart, and my eyes.

When I want a thing, I want it dreadfully.

I'd give my left arm for the Merrimack.

No one can actually define love, but you attempt to, and the closest you can get is longing. And that itself has a melancholy to it. You can say dread, or doom - it's that feeling we all feel when we fall in love with someone: we have this horrible, fearful feeling that maybe we will never have that person in our life.

I think about Milan from morning to night, and there is certainly no lack of effort and desire on my part.

An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, "Come and find me, come and find me."

His fingers leave streaks of cold on my skin, invisible to the eye, and I think about wrapping his shirt around my fist and pulling him in to kiss me; I think about pressing myself against him, but I can't, because all our secrets would keep a space between us.

We desire nothing so much as what we ought not to have.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Why don't we follow our yearning?

I touch her cheek to slow the kiss down, holding her mouth on mine so I can feel every place where our lips touch and every place where they pull away. I savor the air we share in the second afterwards and the slip of her nose across mine. I think of something to say, but it is too intimate, so I swallow it. A moment later I decide I don't care. "I wish we were alone," I say as I back out of the cell. She smiles. "I almost always wish that.

I don't have the strength to stay away from you anymore

Longing is like a seed that wrestles in the ground

I love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.

While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.

Everything was red, the air, the sun, whatever I looked at. Except for him. I fell in love with someone who was human. I watched him walk through the hills and come back in the evening when his work was through. I saw things no woman would see: that he knew how to cry, that he was alone. I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was.