Craig took the phone. Human beings seem to like phones a lot. They stare at them and touch them and talk to them all the time, even with a dog in the room. I do not know why. Phones do not smell at all interesting.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

"My anxieties as to behavior are futile, ever more so, to infinity. If the other, incidentally or negligently, gives the telephone number of a place where he or she can be reached at certain times, I immediately grow baffled: should I telephone or shouldn't I? (It would do no good to tell me that I can telephone - that is the objective, reasonable meaning of the message - for it is precisely this permission I don't know how to handle.) What is futile is what apparently has and will have no consequence. But for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted. From the lover's point of view, the fact becomes consequential because it is immediately transformed into a sign: it is the sign, not the fact, which is consequential (by its aura). If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? My answer itself will be a sign, which the other will inevitably interpret, thereby releasing, between us, a tumultuous maneuvering of images. Everything signifies: by this proposition, I entrap myself, I bind myself in calculations, I keep myself from enjoyment.
Sometimes, by dint of deliberating about "nothing" (as the world sees it), I exhaust myself; then I try, in reaction, to return — like a drowning man who stamps on the floor of the sea — to a spontaneous decision (spontaneity: the great dream: paradise, power, delight): go on, telephone, since you want to! But such recourse is futile: amorous time does not permit the subject to align impulse and action, to make them coincide: I am not the man of mere "acting out" — my madness is tempered, it is not seen; it is right away that I fear consequences, any consequence: it is my fear — my deliberation — which is "spontaneous.

Men have an obsession for wanting to know things that will upset them.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future.

I hate the telephone. I think the lowest circle of hell is reserved for Alexander Graham Bell.

An obsession is where something will not leave your mind

On the phone, it's about as intimate as it can get. The person's right in your ear. You got to be careful on the phone. You can leave yourself wide open

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.

The news of life is carried via telephone. A baby's birth, a couple engaged, a tragic car accident on a late night highway - most milestones of the human journey, good or bad, are foreshadowed by the sound of a ringing.

We are obsessive. We wouldn’t want to be doing anything other than what we are doing. That’s where obsession comes in – when you care about something 24 hours a day.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.