Forbid Us Something and That Thing we Desire

She wanted only to be feared. I wanted to be feared and loved. I didn't want everything she had as she stood onstage that night. I wanted more.

I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul...

She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately.

Her heart was set on experiencing this fantastical phenomenon.

Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own — then,

Because she could not go near all these wonderful things, she longed for them all the more.

She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger.

To be loved to madness — such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment — beyond that boundary.

The most she dared to wish for now was to live long enough to become a woman. (p46)

At that hour she desired sin, the sin which no one commits, the sin which would fill her empty life, and finally set her in that hell of which she was still afraid, just as she had been when she was a little girl.

I once loved a woman, a child I am told
I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!