Obsession, a powerful force that can drive individuals to extraordinary achievements or lead them to the brink of madness, has long fascinated writers, thinkers, and artists. It can be the spark that ignites creativity and passion or the consuming flame that seizes control. In exploring the depths of this intense emotion, we often find reflections of our own desires and fears. Whether we're captivated by love, consumed by ambition, or haunted by unattainable dreams, obsession is a theme that resonates universally. In this curated collection of 86 quotes, we delve into the many facets of obsession, capturing its complexity and the profound impact it has on human life. Join us on this journey as we unravel the wisdom and insights offered by some of the greatest minds, each exploring the allure and danger of obsession in their own unique way.
1. “Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.” - Jeanette Winterson
2. “Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.” - Jeffrey McDaniel
3. “May she wake in torment!" he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. "Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—May she wake in torment!" he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. "Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” - Emily Brontë
4. “All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.” - Virginia Woolf
5. “I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.” - Margaret Atwood
6. “I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.-Claude Frollo ” - Victor Hugo
7. “Why should I blame her that she filled my daysWith misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire?What could have made her peaceful with a mindThat nobleness made simple as a fire,With beauty like a tightened bow, a kindThat is not natural in an age like thisBeing high and solitary and most stern?Why, what could she have done, being what she is?Was there another Troy for her to burn?” - William Butler Yeats
8. “I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches and every word he says. I love all his looks, and all his actions and him entirely and all together.” - Emily Brontë
9. “He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don't love like that anymore. Or maybe it's only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don't know. ” - Peter S. Beagle
10. “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love.” - J.K. Rowling
11. “I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.” - Charlotte Brontë
12. “I want her to melt into me, like butter on toast. I want to absorb her and walk around for the rest of my days with her encased in my skin.I want.” - Sara Gruen
13. “I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.” - Sylvia Plath
14. “I began to understand that the most worthwhile obsession is an obsession that is actually independent of the object of fixation. The object is only borrowed as a pretext, a means, an environment, through which or in which the obsessed person can project his own eternal and essential hunger, thus fulfilling the requirements of death--the dissolution of the ego for something, anything, that exists independently outside of one's self. Perhaps that obsession should be controlled. At some point the most mundane catalyst, a skirt or fallen leaf, is enough to provoke a series of captivating chain reactions, while at another time much more important objects will inspire only an absurd indifference.” - Pham Thi Hoai
15. “He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.” - W. Somerset Maugham
16. “There is practically no activity that cannot be enhanced or replaced by knitting, if you really want to get obsessive about it.” - Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
17. “From the first time I saw you, I've belonged to you completely. I still do. If you want me. -Jace” - Cassandra Clare
18. “It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...” - Zoe Heller
19. “You become what you think about all day long.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
20. “To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue. ” - Jennifer Salaiz
21. “It's despair at the lack of feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world. It's despair that perfectly normal young men can be made vicious and evil because they've won a lot of money. And then do what you've done to me.” - John Fowles
22. “Marie, let’s suppose that two firemen go into a forest to put out a small fire. Afterwards, when they emerge and go over to a stream, the face of one is all smeared with black, while the other man’s face is completely clean. My question is this: which of the two will wash his face? That’s a silly question. The one with the dirty face of course.’ No, the one with the dirty face will look at the other man and assume that he looks like him. And, vice versa, the man with the clean face will see his colleague covered in grime and say to himself: I must be dirty too. I’d better have a wash.’ What are you trying to say?’ I’m saying that, during the time I spent in the hospital, I came to realize that I was always looking for myself in the women I loved. I looked at their lovely, clean faces and saw myself reflected in them. They, on the other hand, looked at me and saw the dirt on my face and, however intelligent or self-confident they were, they ended up seeing themselves reflected in me thinking that they were worse than they were. Please, don’t let that happen to you.” - Paulo Coelho
23. “Mujer, you own my soul.” - Simone Elkeles
24. “All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it.” - Charles Brockden Brown
25. “To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.” - Edgar Allan Poe
26. “And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.” - Ian Fleming
27. “All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.” - Umberto Eco
28. “The truth was...he was in love with her. Totally over-the-line, no-going-back, not-even-dead-would-he-part kind of shit.” - J.R. Ward
29. “Each night I lie and dream about the oneWho kissed me and awakened my desireI spent a single hour with him aloneAnd since that hour, my days are layed with fire.” - L.J. Smith
30. “I think you can love a person too much.You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.” - Jodi Picoult
31. “One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.” - Niyi Osundare
32. “Passion out of passion's obstacles.” - Jeanette Winterson
33. “It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.” - Jeanette Winterson
34. “The world was collapsing, and the only thing that really mattered to me was that she was alive.” - Rick Riordan
35. “Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.” - Anne Lamott
36. “Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.And without feet I can make my way to you,without a mouth I can swear your name.Break off my arms, I'll take hold of youwith my heart as with a hand.Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.And if you consume my brain with fire,I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
37. “But it is easy to call a man in love a mad man.” - Brendan Connell
38. “I desire to be with you. I miss you. I feel lonely when I can't see you. I am obsessed with you, fascinated by you, infatuated with you. I hunger for your taste, your smell, the feel of your soul touching mine.” - Jack Llawayllynn
39. “If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.” - Emily Brontë
40. “and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds... but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshipped. What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pch radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I cancelled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and halfthrottled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque, part o nous ne serons jamais spars; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torneven then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.” - Vladimir Nabokov
41. “All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.” - Mary Roach
42. “This isn't a crush, it's obsession.You are never not in my thoughts. Your scent carries across a room and paralyzes me with longing. I don't want to hold your hand. Part of me wants to set you on fire and hold you while the flame consumes us both, to eat your heart so I know that only I possess it entirely.” - Gwen Hayes
43. “From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her more, and many a time since have I kneeled down in the darkness of the night watch and kissed the deck of that ship because I knew her dear feet had trod it. She was never engaged to me. She treated me as fairly as ever a woman treated a man. I have no complaint to make. It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.” - Arthur Conan Doyle
44. “I am the scourge of God” - Peter Ackroyd
45. “The first time I saw you, my heart fell. The second time I saw you, my heart fell. The third time fourth time fifth time and every time since, my heart has fallen.I stared at her.You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Your hair, your eyes, your lips, your body that you haven't grown into, the way you walk, smile, laugh, the way your cheeks drop when you're mad or upset, the way you drag your feet when you're tired. Every single thing about you is beautiful.I stared at her.When I see you the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops and it is a beautiful place and there is only you. Just you, and my eyes staring at you.I stared.When you're gone, the World starts again, and I don't like it as much. I can live in it, but I don't like it. I just walk around in it and wait to see you again and wait for it to stop again. I love it when it stops. It's the best fucking thing I've ever known or ever felt, the best thing, and that, beautiful Girl, is why I stare at you.” - james frey
46. “I vow I am, and always will be, constant and faithful in my love for you, Anais. Nothing you or anyone else does shall alter these feelings. I am forever loving, forever waiting, forever yearning...forever yours.” - Charlotte Featherstone
47. “The outside world holds no interest for me without you." -Edward” - Stephenie Meyer
48. “Mine first --mine last-- mine even in the grave!” - Louisa May Alcott
49. “Life is obsession and so is reading :D” - Rukamanee Maharjan
50. “I don't possess these thoughts I have --- they possess me. I don't possess these feelings I have --- They obsess me.” - Ashly Lorenzana
51. “I love you so much that nothing can matter to me - not even you...Only my love- not your answer. Not even your indifference” - Ayn Rand
52. “I think it was the institution...I was trying to master it.” - E. Lockhart
53. “I don't ever dream about you and meI don't ever make up stuff about usThat would be considered insanityI don't ever drive by your houseTo see if you're inI don't even have an opinionOn that tramp that you are still seeingI don't know your timetableI don't know your face off by heartBut I must admit that there's still a part of meThat thinks we might get on” - Kate Nash
54. “An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.” - Criss Jami
55. “You spend months barely acknowledging someone's existence and then BOOM, you're emotionally addicted to her. Science would probably blame it on chemicals, genetics or something equally logical, but it didn't feel like anything logical” - C.K. Kelly Martin
56. “Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.” - Marya Hornbacher
57. “It's all you think about, all you talk about, and all you want us to talk about. What in the world would we call something like that? Oh, yeah! An obsession!” - Maggie Stiefvater
58. “I will be with her again, or I will die. There aren’t any other options” - Julie Kagawa
59. “No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.” - Susan Vreeland
60. “Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don't know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that's almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up. ...You're appalled by the new appetites within you, kicking their feet and clawing to get out.” - NIkki Gemmell
61. “I wish there was a word more than ‘love’ itself to convey what I feel for you.” - Faraaz Kazi
62. “جمع الكتب هو استحواذ، ومرض، وإدمان، وفتنة، وقدر. هو ليس بهواية. من يقوم بذلك فلأنه عليه القيام به. ومن لا يقوم بذلك، فيعتقد أنه شبيه بجمع الطوابع” - Jeanette Winterson
63. “Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)” - Steven Heighton
64. “Deep within I'm shaken by the violence of existing for only you...” - Sarah McLachlan
65. “A true artist removes his heart willingly, allows constructive criticism to stomp it, then puts it back—bruised and aching—as he continues to strive for excellence due to the all-consuming obsession and love for his art.” - H G Mewis
66. “As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.” - Don DeLillo
67. “Nobody's bought this land. And no one's going to want it either. It's dying land, lonely land.""Like me, then," I said."Yes, like you." You chewed the corner of your lip. "You both need saving.” - Lucy Christopher
68. “That’s the thing about success and happiness. Every time I fall in love I become absolutely, pathologically obsessed. The moment that you have what you want, and you’re not totally ready for it, you become obsessed with the idea that you don’t deserve it.” - Sara Quin
69. “This obsession is a curious thing. Sometimes wonder about the merits of devoting so much of myself to a singular climbing objective. Much of the time it beats me down, leaves me hanging my head in despair. But then there are the moments that bring me to life. When excitement wells up inside my chest in a way that doesn’t happen in every day life. Today my fingertips were cracked and bleeding. I made no progress despite great conditions. Now I am on the ground and can hardly contain my excitement to get back on the wall. It’s a crazy rollercoaster and I owe my family and partners a great deal for encouraging me through it all.” - Tommy Caldwell
70. “The teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development.” - Edgar Allan Poe
71. “He could quite quickly become detached from the nuances of common human emotion. Particularly if he was engaged in some aspect of a scientific problem or research. His work excluded any consideration for the feelings of those around him. And he rarely excused himself or justified his behavior. It was as if he was compelled to focus all his energy on one subject and was unaware that others did not follow his obsession.” - Theresa Breslin
72. “I don't believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit, unwittingly drawing them closer until they extinguish the very flame they were drawn to.” - Rosamund Lupton
73. “Kiss me twice, I am schizophrenic .. Kiss me ten times, I am obsessive!” - أحمد عمارة
74. “I see love, like art, as an obsession. Maybe that's an overly romantic view of human existence, but I'm an overly romantic human being. If love, like rock and roll, doesn't consume me 24-7, it's not love. It can be respect, appreciation, admiration, wonderment, it can be a world of glory and a lifetime of peace, but I can't call it love. Love burns me and confuses me. Love's a light that can't be extinguished.” - Scott Weiland
75. “He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes.” - Émile Zola
76. “My inner goddess confirms that staring at a beautiful/rich/powerful face is the basis of True Love.” - Jess C. Scott
77. “William looked up... through his tears... past the catwalk and lights... past the sky... through the dark and clouds and stars and into the void where he once knew God existed, then turned himself outside-in, alone, and asked, 'Why?” - Jake Vander Ark
78. “To be obsessed by the idea of freedom, for instance, is itself a form of slavery. Such people are in the chains of the hope of freedom, and are therefore able to do little else than struggle with them.” - Idries Shah
79. “Obsession; when thoughts are held captive and no longer your own.” - Donna Lynn Hope
80. “If you have to speculate if someone loves you and wants to be with you, chances are they don't. It's not that complicated. Love, in most cases, betrays the one feeling it. Don't waste moments waiting and wondering. Don't throw away your time dreaming of someone that doesn't want you. No one is that amazing, certainly not the one who would pass you up.” - Donna Lynn Hope
81. “how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was anotherappleto slice into pieces.Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon,that meanswe're inconsolable.Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.These our bodies, possessed by light.Tell me we'll never get used to it.” - Richard Siken
82. “Much better now. And Sunny—there's no such thing as 'too much' when it comes to us. Too much mutual interest, or awareness, or desire, or too much damn love—there's no such thing.""I love you beyond obsession," I murmur, terrified because it is too much."I love you to insanity," he replies, utterly solemn. "That's who I am, and that is who we are. I don't have any qualms about admitting it, and I don't have any regrets. Do you?” - Olivia Lynde
83. “Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.” - Theodore Sturgeon
84. “Human beings had two basic orientations: HAVING and BEINGHAVING: seeks to acquire, posses things even peopleBEING: focuses on the experience; exchanging, engaging, sharing with other people” - Erich Fromm
85. “[...] passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image.” - Denis de Rougemont
86. “Ingo was a fever, and so far she hadn't found the antidote.” - Margaret Way
