Murnane recounts his life through his abiding obsession with horse racing.
Kraus's entire body of work betrays an abiding obsession with context; one can easily imagine the desire to escape it.
In the way unique to teen-age girls, I had a particularly deep and abiding obsession with this boy.
Shaw's abiding obsession was with our language, with the inconsistencies of its spelling and pronunciation and the inadequacies of its alphabet and principles of punctuation.
Certainly, Karelin was not an abiding obsession, as he was to Matt Ghaffari, the effusive Iranian-born United States wrestler who lost the Olympic gold medal match to Karelin in 1996.
I kind of like that because it is infused, those catalogs of information, it all has the mobility and energy, and it is all animated by this abiding obsession with evil and terror.
Carey summarizes the abiding obsession in the novels as the collision of "the spiritual and the miraculous" with "science and rationality," and it is this persistent hypersensitivity to the numinous and immaterial aspects of the world and the human condition that sets Golding apart from the broad river of social realism that so defines the 20th-century English novel.
Another abiding obsession is the landscape around him, the overnight subdivisions and the cyclical shopping centers, of which he says, "Whoever designed them knew that families would spend their lifetimes in these parking lots, going in and out of these stores, and wanted to create a building so fantastically boring that no one noticed it was really there".
As it proved, among my best memories of the filmmaking are the conversations (drunken or otherwise) I had with Fred, in which we both acknowledged, I think, that, different as film directors and novelists are, our abiding obsession was the same: the mysteries of storytelling - of timing, pacing and the exactly judged release of information and emotion.
In his second novel, Atomised (2000), he tilted ferociously, and often creatively, against such targets as the decline of religion, consumerism, sexual freedom and "free love", the liberalist tradition of the west and, with an abiding obsession, the nature of love.
Rilke, in a far different context, had this to say of Cézanne's abiding obsession with apples and wine bottles: "And (like Van Gogh) he makes his 'saints' out of such things: and forces them — forces them — to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and all glory, and he doesn't know whether he has succeeded in making them do it for him.
