don’t know if you’re taking requests right now. but anything about jealousy and possessiveness, from any sides?
An Attempt at Jealousy by Marina Tsvetaeva
There is more self-love than love in jealousy.
— Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, tr. J. W. Willis Bund, M.A. LL.B & J. Hain Friswell
"A jealous lover covets a certain location at the centre of her beloved’s affection only to find it occupied by someone else. If jealousy were a dance it would be a pattern of placement and displacement. Its emotional focus is unstable. Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves."
"Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves. It is a dance with a dialectical nature. For the jealous lover must balance two contradictory realities within her heart: on the one hand, that of herself at the centre of the universe and in command of her own will, offering love to her beloved; on the other, that of herself off the centre of the universe and in despite of her own will, watching her beloved love someone else."
— Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera; from ‘Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God’
Jealous one I am, green-eyed, spite-seething.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know.
— Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
Surrounded by the flames of jealousy, the jealous one winds up, like the scorpion, turning the poisoned sting against himself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. Clancy Martin
But I drank your jealousy like a magic potion,
— Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova: Epic and Dramatic Fragments and Long Poems; from ‘Prologue’, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer
I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"…at first I didn’t understand about jealousy, I mean I didn’t understand it could be like madness."
"Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world."
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Jealousy can open the blood, / It can make black roses.
— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘The Swarm’
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on:
— William Shakespeare, Othello
As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.
— Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, tr. Richard Howard
I was so jealous it burned.
— Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox
"He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there, with me, in me, does he feel safe. If only I could make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede out of sight. For a lifetime perhaps."
"Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God’, and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man. But I suppose there are different kinds of desire. My desire now was nearer hatred than love..."
"Sarah and I used to have long arguments on jealousy. I was jealous even of the past, of which she spoke to me frankly as it came up - the affairs that meant nothing at all (except possibly the unconscious desire to find that final spasm Henry had so woefully failed to evoke). She was as loyal to her lovers as she was to Henry, but what should have provided me with some comfort (for undoubtedly she would be loyal to me too) angered me. There was a time when she would laugh at my anger, simply refusing to believe that it was genuine, just as she refused to believe in her own beauty, and I would be just as angry because she refused to be jealous of my past or my possible future. I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all."
— Graham Green, The End of the Affair
After you left me / I let a dog smell at / My chest and my belly. It will fill its nose / And set out to find you. / I hope it will tear the / Testicles of your lover and bite off his penis / Or at least / Will bring me your stockings between his teeth.
— Yehuda Amichai, Amen; A Dog After Love, tr. by the author & Ted Hughes
...the pangs of a jealousy as humiliating as it is cruel...
— Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, tr. Ernest Dowson
I would have possessed you before all women, / calling your name, / calling you mine.
— Anne Sexton, Live Or Die; from 'Menstruation At Forty'
"You come and you make me sick with desire, with a desire to possess you, to have you around me always, talking to me naturally, moving about as if you were a part of me."
"… I must have you exclusively, fiercely, possessively."
"I won’t share you!!! You’re mine and I’m going to keep you. I have become fiercely possessive."
"…you’re mine whether it is acknowledged or not."
— Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953
You think you are possessing me - / But I've got my teeth in you.
— Angela Carter, Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter; from ‘Unicorn’
There is no happiness or peace for me, save in the possession of this woman whom I hate and love with equal fury.
— Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, tr. Ernest Dowson
"Her desire [...] is fanatical, violent, blindly possessive. She wants it in a way she has rarely wanted anything: so badly it hurts, to the point where she is capable of choking, burning, destroying anything that comes between her and the satisfaction of her desire."
"...the strange way she had of kissing him, sometimes using her teeth, biting him as if to signify the sudden savagery of her love, her desire to completely possess him."
— Leïla Slimani, Lullaby, tr. Sam Taylor
Oh, to possess my love. To make him my own, like my very own hand [...] Knowing his every thought. Feeling his every pain. To be two with him. Double and fierce with him.
— Anne Hébert, Kamouraska, tr. Norman Shapiro
He whispers: “I’m not sorry / For loving you this way— / Either be mine alone / Or I will kill you.”
— Anna Akhmatova, Anno Domini MCMXXI: Untitled, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer
you are mine he repeats / you are thinking of me
— Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'Bestiarum'
But I also wanted increasingly, and with a violence which almost burnt the tenderness away, to own her, to possess her body and soul.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
What I remember most clearly now about that night is the exultation of taking her roughly, for the second time, and of causing her to flinch, and to hold me closer in her pain, knowing she would be mine to do with as I wished, that it was her choice, not mine, that had made her my possession.
— John Burnside, The Dumb House
You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.
— Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
