In her wonderful novel The Hearing Trumpet, the surrealist novelist Leonora Carrington has her 92-year-old heroine muse on her past desire to write poetry: At times I thought of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows.
When we no longer want something, we may speak of a past desire.
While TED speaker Esther Perel dissects and uncovers the secret to desire in long-term relationships, I'm wondering past desire and looking to the long term part.
"We can only do what we want," he said, and to indulge the maternal hypothetical would be as irrational as if he were now to pay attention to his own past desires.
Nothing about who I was or who I might have been.' The novel's slow-burning revelation of past desires and self-abnegation stands in direct contrast to the tense, involving battle of wills between Rob and Jamie on the Eiger.
Their stay is more than long enough, however, to open up carnal and cultural rifts: Jack is bemused by his girlfriend's mother and father — unkempt anarchists played by Delpy's real-life parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy — and nagged by continual revelations of her past desires.
[Ernest] Renan says that a nation requires three elements: common glories of the past, a desire to share the present, and a uniting idea for the future.
It was only after I was approached to write a novella with a supernatural aspect that I realised all my novels are haunted: by the past, by desire or by guilt.
FDI inflows into property remains relatively strong but utilised foreign investment last year in the cement industry, which China has also been trying to cool, fell by 67%.But even if double-digit FDI growth is a thing of the past, the desire to invest in China is hardly going to dry up any time soon.
Though verging on mawkish, Fitzgerald's observation anticipates the deep romanticism that comes to maturity in Gatsby: the ambivalent attitude to the past; the desire, innate and imperfect, for not only the antebellum world, but the impossible future which Gatsby strains to see.
After spending two years blasting away at the iPhone's virtual keyboard, I thought I'd grown past my desire for a physical one.
