Fascination For Or With Quotes & Sayings

I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage. — David Bowie

Women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called 'fascination.' Coming of age in the 1920's was a competitive business ... — Susan Cain

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life. — Jose Saramago

As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn't here. Before that, my parents weren't here. And before that ... — John Burnside

I think there is a fascination with choral music in general. — Ed Droste

Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat. — Graham Swift

... The group is a wonderful mix of people - a microcosm, I believe, of what's really out there. Listen, Lucy, you do my job for a while and here's what you learn. No one is normal. Everybody struggles with something. Marital problems, depression, codependency, maybe a looming fascination with shoes or leather bags that keeps her working overtime shifts to pay off her debt. Whatever. Stop thinking everyone else has it together. It's not true. Precious few people have life figured out. 'Normal' just isn't normal anymore. — Ann Wertz Garvin

When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world. — Elie Wiesel

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real.
See what happens.
Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist. — Jane Jeong Trenka

I could see neither fascination nor delight on their faces, and I wondered if it was possible to get so used to joy that you stopped noticing it? — Martin Pistorius

The village of Wall watched the battle of wills with fascination, wondering what the outcome would be, for no one crossed Bridget Forester: she had a tongue that could, the villagers said, blister the paint from a barn door and tear the bark from an oak. — Neil Gaiman

When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words. — Michael Morpurgo

I've been doing TV for fourteen years, and I've always had a fascination with the political business side. It's ruled my life. Ratings or no ratings have decided where I live, who I work with, and how long I'll be doing that particular job. — Charlotte Ross

This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had found that "feeling special" was a private experience, and no one else's projected fascination could substitute for quiet absorption in your own life. — Lionel Shriver

At least since Darwin's day, we have known that all of us originally emerged from the sea. That fact may account for our abiding fascination with it, our longing to return there, whether to sail the main or merely contemplate its restless enormity. — J. D. McClatchy

I was seized at once with a profound fascination, a burning thirst to learn, to immerse myself totally, to melt away, to become as one with this foreign universe. To know it as if I had been born and raised there, begun life there. I wanted to learn the language, I wanted to read the books, I wanted to penetrate every nook and cranny.
It was a kind of malady, a dangerous weakness, because I also realized that these civilizations are so enormous, so rich, complex, and varied, that getting to know even a fragment of one of them, a mere scrap, would require devoting one's whole life to the enterprise. Cultures are edifices with countless rooms, corridors, balconies, and attics, all arranged, furthermore, into such twisting, turning labyrinths, that if you enter one of them, there is no exit, no retreat, no turning back. To become a Hindu scholar, a Sinologist, an Arabist, or a Hebraist is a lofty all-consuming pursuit, leaving no space or time for anything else. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

Sansa sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching with a strange fascination. She had never seen a man die before. She ought to be crying too, she thought, but the tears would not come. Perhaps she had used up all her tears for Lady and Bran. It would be different if it had been Jory or Ser Rodrik or Father, she told herself. The young man in the blue cloak was nothing to her, some stranger from the Vale of Arryn whose name she had forgotten as soon as she heard it. And now the world would forget his name too, Sansa realized; there would be no songs sung for him. That was sad. — George R R Martin

No, you will never been tamed, you are a monster, the eternal wild one. I often wonder where you came from, only someone with something to hide has such a cloudy beginnings. Who are you? Or more importantly who were you? There is only the odd bits that are known about you and nothing is set in stone. Do you even know the real you behind the charade? The fact that you are aroused by virginity, is a worrying fascination. I would not be surprised if the person who turned you realised what a monster he'd created. They were not called Frankenstein by any chance? Maybe you are a creature of many parts? Did you destroy your creator as well in a fit of rage? Is that why your are always looking for your virgin bride? Only you take beautiful swans and turn them into ugly ducklings. You will never return to that life that you give up. Stop trying to recreate them. — Beverley Price

My smell stays with you? I ruined you ... for what?"
"Your smell keeps me going all the time. I'm in a clutch game or at practice and it's full count? Your cloves and vanilla scent calms me down. I spray it on the front of my uniform and rub my right hand across like this." I demonstrate by rubbing my chest and she watches me in fascination like a starstruck teenager watches a rockstar play his bass. "I went to three different stores before I found the exact scent. Expensive. French perfume. Chamade by Guerlain."
She nods looking fascinated or charmed by me at least for a few seconds. "I got it in Paris when I was there a few years ago. I love it."
"I do too. So yes, you ruined me. For anyone else."
She's smiling but then it slowly disappears like a countdown does as it goes from ten to zero. "What are you doing to me, Elvis?" she asks, looking troubled. — Katherine Owen

America is fascinated by crime. — Floyd C. Forsberg

We are not afraid of predators, we're transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters ... — E. O. Wilson

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. — Oscar Wilde

When fashion turns over it brings in little tiny creaks and cracks. This is the fascination and that is where you have to watch every step. — Diana Vreeland

They got that way, Garraty had noticed. Complete withdrawal from everything and everyone around them. Everything but the road. They stared at the road with a kind of horrid fascination, as if it were a tightrope thay had to walk over an endless, bottomless chasm. — Richard Bachman

The recent fascination, I think, reflects the shift in approach by law enforcement officials to embrace technology as wholeheartedly as the rest of the world. — Jeffery Deaver

The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God. It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice. When that past is the past of one's people or country or church, then the danger is terrible indeed, because then the past makes claims upon our honor and allegiance. Then it knocks at the door, saying softly, "I am still here." And then our plans for social control - for inducing the kind of amnesia that has people always hankering after what is supposed to be new, without asking inconvenient questions about where the desirable thing has come from and where it will take us - must fail. For a man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never. — Anthony Esolen

The horrors of Vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the thrilling fascination, of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present use to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium ... -contemptibly small compared with the price paid for it in agony and torture. — Henry Jacob Bigelow

People are so different, so fascinating, each in his or her own specific world, waiting to crash into and effect another. Waiting to discover things about themselves, little details and preferences to build an identity out of. The secret identities are the finest, the most difficult to ever fully know. But the fulfillment is so intense, so beautiful. More puzzles, more individual pieces to fit. — Vee Hoffman

Have you seen interviews with the young John Lennon or Bob Dylan, when the reporter tries to ask about their personal selves? The boys deflect these queries with withering sarcasm. Why? Because Lennon and Dylan know that the part of them that writes the songs is not "them," not the personal self that is of such surpassing fascination to their boneheaded interrogators. Lennon and Dylan also know that the part of themselves that does the writing is too sacred, too precious, too fragile to be redacted into sound bites for the titillation of would-be idolators (who are themselves caught up in their own Resistance). — Steven Pressfield

One of the important things to learn about parenting is that the more you worry about a child, the less the child will worry abouthim- or herself ... instead of worrying, watch with fascination and wonder as your child's life unfolds, and help the child take responsibility for his or her own life. — Charlotte Sophia Kasl

It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods. — Stephen Jay Gould

There's a lot of Google fascination out there and we share it, and we're going to compete, we're going to compete very, very hard. — Steve Ballmer

Skinner's suits were a constant source of fascination to Robert. They seemed to be made from an alien synthetic fibre that never creased or got dirty. Indeed, it seemed possible that Skinner himself was constructed of the same material. — Christopher Fowler

Perhaps because of the special nature of the TIA, or perhaps because of the limitless human capacity for technical fascination, programmers have continued to hack at and develop original VCS games. There is a thriving hobbyist community that has picked up the Atari VCS, using and refining emulators, writing disassemblers and development tools, and even manufacturing cartridges and selling them, complete with boxes and manuals. This "homebrew" scene could be seen, strictly speaking, as continuing the commercial life of the Atari VCS, but the community is not very corporate. It operates on the scale of zines and unsigned bands, with most recent ROMs offered for free online - even if they are also sold in limited releases of a few hundred copies in cartridge form. — Nick Montfort

But it kills me, this fascination with celebrities' personal lives. — Calista Flockhart

There's one thing I've learned about mortals. They're a lot more resilient and a whole bunch more resourceful than they usually give themselves credit for. Why else do you think the Fae have always had such a fascination with them? Why d'you think Auberon uses changelings to guard the Gate? Trolls are stronger, cheaper, more plentiful, and nobody cares if they get exploded or ripped to pieces. But he uses mortals. Because they're full of hidden strengths. — Lesley Livingston

Who's the boy who thinks he can mess with my men?" he demanded.

"Nobody," said the boy. "Just the King of Cats."

The words made the gang draw up short; obviously the title meant something to them, though Paris had never heard it before.

"It's a very simple situation," the boy went on. "You can join the Rooks and follow my orders without question. Or you can immediately decide that your territory starts east of here. Screaming as you run is optional."

Paris suspected that it would be a good time for him to scream and run, but the situation had a sort of awful fascination. The boy was definitely, absolutely mad, and they were both going to be pounded to death, and he couldn't look away.

"Or you can fight me over it," said the boy. "Care to wager your gang on a duel?"

The leader hesitated a moment; then he sneered, "So long as you fight fair."

"Nobody gets anything but what he earns from me — Rosamund Hodge

Whatever fascination Lymond held for her mother, it had no power at five in the morning. — Dorothy Dunnett

There are five unread messages on the screen, which is what happens when you're the meat in a hot girl sandwich. Threesomes trump checking your phone. That's a no-brainer.

Logan: Hey, bro, Wellsy's friend Allie is crashing at our place this weekend.

Logan: Keep your dick in your pants. G and I aren't in the mood to beat u senseless if u try something. Wellsy might be in the mood for violence, tho. So: dick = pants = don't bother our guest.

Hannah: Allie's staying with u guys til Sunday. She's in a vulnerable place right now. Don't take advantage of her or else I'll be unhappy. And u don't want to make me unhappy, do u?

I snicker. Hannah, diplomatic as always. I quickly scan the last two messages.

Garrett: Allie's gonna crash in my room.

Garrett: Your dick can stay in your room.

Jeez, what is everybody's fascination with my dick? — Elle Kennedy

We all need to learn a new language for love - a language that speaks not in socks, pancakes, and paychecks, but in shared fascination with physics or poetry, delight in each other's uniqueness, and mutual practical and emotional support. — Barbara Sher

...books change lives, in big ways and small, from the simple desire to spend a few quiet hours in a comfy chair, swept away by a story, to the profound realization that the reader is not alone in the world, that there is someone else like him or her, someone who has faced the same fears, the same confusions, the same grief, the same joys. Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure. It is a way to learn how to knit or build a house or solve an equation, a way to be moved to laughter and wonder and to learn how to live...in all our fascination with technology we've forgotten that a simple book can make a difference. — Roxanne J. Coady

I had a constant fascination with the darkside. It is another world, bordering on insanity, and demonic possession, or what I thought was my own Soul Bending personal nirvana. Its good to be back in the middle of the boat, instead of hanging on for dear life in the last life boat. — Glenn Hughes

But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvelous to see the people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference. — Joseph Conrad

When I was younger, before I was born, I lost my twin, so I think I've always had a fascination for telepathy or the way that twins act and react with each other. — Sophie Turner

I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science. — Joshua Lederberg

I don't think I was particularly in need of superheroes. I never had any fascination with Superman or Spider-Man or a Batman kind of character. If it happened at all, it was imagined characters that I had invented. My dad was a role model for me. He was a fascinating man. There was intrigue and entertainment growing up with him. He gave me an edict that I still pursue: Life should never be boring. — Christian Bale

While part of my mind puzzled that out, I watched my mother with fascination. I'd listened to her tell her stories. I'd seen and felt her fight. But really, truly, I'd never seen her in action in a real-life crisis. She showed every bit of that hard control she did around me, but here, I could see how necessary it was. A situation like this created panic. Even among the guardians, I could sense those who were so keyed up that they wanted to do something drastic. My mother was a voice of reason, a reminder that they had to stay focused and fully assess the situation. Her composure calmed everybody; her strong manner inspired them. This, I realized, was how a leader behaved. — Richelle Mead

Love changes, aye, in the manner of growing to encompass as much of its subject as possible. Virtues, flaws, limitations, everything - love will fondle them all, with child-like fascination.' She — Steven Erikson

I got a fascination with food. — Heather Mills

Our fascination with the outlaw, the killer, the meth dealer, is emblematic of a pretty embarrassing problem: we trim the fat of evil. We size it up, add a glitter to it never present in reality, and make it pretty for the cameras. It looks more boring and crude than anything else, so we give it a tummy tuck. — John Thomas Allen

And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating. — Alberto Moravia

Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics. — Mario Livio

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. — Oscar Wilde

I still read the British papers, but I've never been a Royalist, ever. It's funny, there always seems to be much more of a fascination with the Royal Family over here then there does in England. — Paul Bettany

We may discover resources on the moon or Mars that will boggle the imagination, that will test our limits to dream. And the fascination generated by further exploration will inspire our young people to study math, and science, and engineering and create a new generation of innovators and pioneers. — George W. Bush

In grace and beauty and sheer fascination, they were alike. But where Katherine had been a white kitten, Elena was a snow-white tigress. — L.J.Smith

Even the great Van Helsing is not immune from these confusing and cloying vampiric attractions, 'the fascination of the wanton Un-dead' (p. 393). But destroy the vampires though he and the other men indeed do in the end, it is Mina who remains the most important enabling factor for the defeat of Dracula, with the aid, of course, of what she calls 'the wonderful power of money!' (p. 378). And the reason for this is her ambiguous sexuality. In her is to be found something — Bram Stoker

Are the mass media on the side of the power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? — Jean Baudrillard

Oh! Great Lady of Fascination! We arise in somnambulant awe and dance entranced as you glide slowly and softly through the Heavenly Dome and suffuse our presence with unfathomable desires for faerie worlds, where all is order, where all is beauty, where nuances of quality proliferate miraculously in myraids of delicious subtleties. — Lady Svetlana

Be alive! See what you want! DO NOT lose your fascination! What you're fascinated with becomes fastened to you! — Joseph Simmons

I always was fascinated with China, because I was born in Europe, and for us, China had this fascination and mystery. The first time I came here was in 1989. They were on bicycles, and the speed of the growth has been incredible. — Diane Von Furstenberg

I've always had a fascination with making your own music but never have been skilled enough to play the instrument, so to be able to make music without the ability was awesome. — Avicii

Maybe I have this fascination with the dark side because I live in the light. I don't have any dysfunction, and I've never experienced trauma. — Lisa Unger

There's a really rough and relatively consistent hierarchy of concerns. My musical interests come first and principally my fascination with how notes and rhythms interlock. Then comes the technical side like programming, instruments and designing instruments. Next is production and mixing and beyond that I start to care less. — Squarepusher

The explosion of museum exhibitions is only a mirror image of what has happened to fashion itself this millennium. With the force of technology, instant images and global participation, fashion has developed from being a passion for a few to a fascination - and an entertainment - for everybody. — Alexander McQueen

They lived for different futures, but they were each other's unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace. — Thomas Pynchon

My heart gave a weird little flutter. I'd been around Lexi for over a month, listening to her gush over boys, watching her point out the "gorgeous" ones. I understood human beauty now, and I'd even reached the point where I could nudge Lexi toward a cute guy, and she would agree that he was hot, but I still didn't get the fascination.
Maybe all the boy-watching had finally sunk in, because this stranger was, to use two of Lexi's favorite words, absolutely gorgeous. — Julie Kagawa

He did say I fascinated him, but he really should have clarified to me that I was just the fascination for the day. — Abbi Glines

Complexity has and will maintain a strong fascination for many people. It is true that we live in a complex world and strive to solve inherently complex problems, which often do require complex mechanisms. However, this should not diminish our desire for elegant solutions, which convince by their clarity and effectiveness. Simple, elegant solutions are more effective, but they are harder to find than complex ones, and they require more time, which we too often believe to be unaffordable — Niklaus Wirth

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn't get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution. — Claude Levi-Strauss

I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that. — Robert Harris

Some of us will admit to a simple fascination with the inner world for its own sake, a fascination with no further goal than the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of engaging the mysterious, dark ground of our own nature. — Sandra Lee Dennis

The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the
reality of this fascination for one moment. — Antonin Artaud

Marie's eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into women by evaporation, of women made into dugged swine. the fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, again, again, like a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream across the corridor to be caught in the claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight recoiling, rebounding, re-shuttling on down the inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with one last scream from all present. — Ray Bradbury

Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That's an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life. — Joseph Campbell

Silence is banished from our screens; it has no place in communication. Media images (and media texts resemble media images in every way) never fall silent: images and messages must follow one upon the other without interruption. But silence is exactly that - a blip in the circuitry, that minor catastrophe, that slip which, on television for instance, becomes
highly meaningful - a break laden now with anxiety, now with jubilation, which confirms the fact that all this communication is basically nothing but a rigid script, an uninterrupted fiction designed to free us not only from the void of the television screen but equally from the void of our own mental screen, whose images we wait on with the same fascination. — Jean Baudrillard

In each life, no matter how it's lived, there is cause for fascination and often delight — Hugh Massingberd

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination. — H.P. Lovecraft