Quotes about longing
Rubén Bonifaz Nuño -
A mí me ha tocado no estar contigo no tengo miradas para encontrarteni hay cosa en que pueda reconocerte.
Franz Kafka -
They no longer wanted to entice anyone all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus
Charles Williams - The Hot Spot
The hell with her I wouldn’t go back. But wouldn’t I? What about later on? Keeping the thought of her out of that bleak hotbox of a room was going to be like trying to dam a river with a tennis racket.
Dennis Sharpe - Distant Thunder
He’s here. I feel him. His body is touching mine and it’s very real. We’re holding each other it’s just all too…perfect?
Robert Southey -
Our restlessness in this world seems to indicate that we are intended for a better. We have all of us a longing after happiness and surely the Creator will gratify all the natural desires he has implanted in us.
Aurora Whittet - Bloodmark
I wanted desperately to be part of our pack I felt a hole inside myself where my pack should have been.
Sophia Rose - Liquid Me: Poetry and Prose
It is poetic and lyrical words that spill forth like cool waters into the dusty dry rock bed of the Soul desiring love. It has been said that I’ve lived in the desert all my life and do not know what it means to be wet.
Thomas à Kempis - The Imitation of Christ
My God, Sweetness beyond words, make bitter all the carnal comfort that draws me from love of the eternal and lures me to its evil self by the sight of some delightful good in the present. Let it not overcome me, my God. Let not flesh and blood conquer me. Let not the world and its brief glory deceive me, nor the devil trip me by his craftiness. Give me courage to resist, patience to endure, and constancy to persevere. Give me the soothing unction of Your spirit rather than all the consolations
Debasish Mridha -
Love is the essence of life,Love is the universal language of all creation,Love is the eternal desire,Love is the life's flower with fragrance to share,So feel the longing for love and being beloved.
Edward J. Rathke - Ash Cinema
The ocean of the past, I still hide from so much of it and rely on all that I don't run from. Everything before him, I waited for the nightmare to end, and it did when he accepted me into his arms. It was a new birth, a new life, but it flashed too briefly and left me with only these rabid bits of time that eat me, these memories that haunt me, but he, the ghost I need, remains lost.
Susan Sontag - The Volcano Lover: A Romance
Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.
Philip Sington - The Valley of Unknowing
Desire is an appetite, quickly sated. Longing is a wound, an opening in the heart or the spirit. Whatever the cause, whatever the duration, it almost always leaves a scar.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
With God, being lost is nothing more than an idea that never has and never will be anything more than an idea.
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to thi
Marcel Proust -
This was to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which p
Anton Chekhov - The Three Sisters
With total rapture and delight he talks about the birds which he can see from his prison window, and which he had never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now of course, after he's been released, he doesn't notice the birds anymore, just as beforehand. In the same way you won't notice Moscow, when you actually live there.
Samuel Johnson -
What', said he, ' makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporeal necessities with myself; he is hungry and crops the grass, he is thirsty and drinks the stream, his thirst and hunger are appeased, he is satisfied and sleeps; he rises again and is hungry, he is again fed and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not
Alain de Botton - The Architecture of Happiness
While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most
Sarah McCoy - The Baker's Daughter
People often miss things that don't exist--miss things that were but are not anymore.
Rosemary Sullivan - and Romantic Obsession
But sex as a physical act is merely athletics, a momentary relief. What it needs to be powerful is desire, and the strongest element of desire is longing. It's in the work. Desider-, sidus: from the stars. The longing that reaches beyond space and time.
Heather McVea - November's End
Calina studied Nessa’s profile in the dim light of dawn. Her pulse raced as she formed a question in her mind. “Who do you want to be bothered by?”Calina felt like anything could happen in the silence that followed. It wrapped around Nessa and her, stifling the breath from her body and tightening her throat.Nessa shifted and turned so she was facing Calina. It was too dark for Calina to see Nessa’s eyes, but she could feel them wandering over her face.“You.” The word was exhaled from Nessa as if
Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.
Raymond Luczak -
...But the heart is not a computer that can be upgraded so quickly and easily with the latest version of love. Love cannot be sealed hermetically inside a tight box like any other on the store shelf; even though the word itself is in public domain, its quality is not. Love cannot promise a full customer satisfaction garanteed or a whole lifetime of dreams shared refunded, with no questions asked. Love cannot be agreed to in terms and conditions as quickly as the "Next" button being clicked. Thes
Michele Young-Stone - The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors
She'd been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster.
Mohsin Hamid - The Reluctant Fundamentalist
I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.
Théophile Gautier - Mademoiselle de Maupin
One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness l
Alain de Botton - Status Anxiety
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.
Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart
Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and youcatch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In aninstant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. Butif you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, justbarely for a few moments.
Holly Robinson - Sleeping Tigers
The loneliest days are the ones where you keep company with someone you love who can’t hear you.
Elizabeth Berg - Never Change
But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.
M.C. Frank - No Ordinary Star
So you say there is no Father Christmas, You say there is no Santa Claus Reindeer cannot fly, it's all a grown-up lie...
Hildegard of Bingen -
Like billowing clouds, Like the incessant gurgle of the brook,The longing of the spirit can never be stilled.
Kim Sunée -
But it seems that I can tackle the most esoteric of recipes, the most elusive puff pastry, as long as I do not have to count the empty layers of loneliness building up inside.
Orhan Pamuk - The Black Book
As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips out of my mind. But by now I'd realised I'd not even be kissing myself; I'd be kissing the mirror.
Chloe Thurlow - Being a Girl
I gaze out of the window at the lanes of red taillights streaming towards the hills, the city laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, the view confirming that I was much more alone than I thought, and all those red lights inspired nothing more than a sense that I, too, should be fleeing somewhere.
Jostein Gaarder - The Ringmaster's Daughter
I didn't feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin.
Carl R. Rogers - A Way of Being
I am isolated. I sit in a glass ball, I see people through a glass wall. I scream, but they do not hear me.- Ellen West
Sara Baume -
See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.
Jenim Dibie - The Calligraphy of God
Nos·tal·gia (n):A feeling that lingers long after the taste is gone.
Katherine McIntyre - Soul Solution
She would never forget how his soul was lonely as the moon they’d met under, and how, for several brief moments, she’d been able to chase the loneliness away.
Salla Simukka - As White as Snow
Longing was a feeling that was hard to live with. It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t pay attention to time or place. It was overwhelming and demanding, grasping and selfish. It clouded thoughts or made them too bright, too sharp. Longing demanded unconditional surrender. Lumikki tried to fight it and failed. She didn’t want to long and yet she longed. She didn’t want to remember, and yet her dreams and her body remembered, reminding her constantly.The longing was physical. It was dizziness. It
Jeffrey Eugenides - The Marriage Plot
Wouldn't it be nice to be done with it? To be done with sex and longing? Mitchell could almost imagine pulling it off, sitting on a bridge at night with the Seine flowing by. He looked up at all the lighted windows along the river's arc. He thought of all the people going to sleep or reading or listening to music, all the lives contained by a great city like this, and, floating up in his mind, rising just above the rooftops, he tried to feel, to vibrate among, all those million tremulous souls.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Frankenstein
But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympath
Tessa Afshar - Pearl in the Sand
We long for things that harm us and run from the things that grow and heal us. We think good is bad and bad is good.
Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin
If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.
Rebecca Solnit - A Field Guide to Getting Lost
One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.
Debasish Mridha M.D. -
Life gives you what you are deeply longing for.
John Mark Green -
The Ache That Would Not LeaveBehind the hum and routine of daily living, there lay a persistent and wild longing for something she could not easily put into words. It felt like impulsive adventures and watching the sun rise over unfamiliar mountains, or coffee in a street café, set to the background music of a foreign language. It was the smell of the ocean, with dizzying seagulls whirling in a cobalt sky; exotic foods and strange faces, in a city where no one knew her name. She wanted secrets w
Dinesh Kumar Biran -
Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near...
James Kubicki - A Heart on Fire: Rediscovering Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Jesus is the answer to the longing of every human heart. The love of his heart is the only love capable of filling our human longing—because it is human, yet infinite, and because it is also divine. Not only does each individual need and desire this love, but the world, taken as a whole, needs it.
Thomas Lynch - The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.
V.E. Schwab - A Gathering of Shadows
She used to think that if she stole enough, the want would fade, the hunger would go away, but maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of what she didn’t have, of what she wasn’t, but what she was.
Ramesh Menon - Bhagavata Purana
One's longing is not so much there for sense-gratification, profit and self-preservation, instead one's karma is there for no other purpose than inquiring after the Absolute Truth.
E.M. Forster - Maurice
The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.
Pablo Neruda - The Book of Questions
Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.
Michael Frayn - Constructions
We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grain
Erri De Luca - Tre cavalli
Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.
Lydia Millet - Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.
Luigina Sgarro -
If we could imagine, while we live them, to what mundane moments nostalgia manages to stick itself...
Jackie Haze - Borderless
Portland was a dream both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense, both tangible and not - a fleeting affair you want to hold on to but can't, so you try memorizing her every detail only to fail to do so in the consumption, in the savoring, in the absorbing of yourself into her. When she's gone, she comes to you in snippets, replaying in your mind like a fragmented picture show.
Dean Hughes - Before the Dawn
I'd rather do something than read about it.""That's fine, but if you do it, and then can't think what it means, it's never much of a memory. Life has more to so with memories of the past and longings for the future than it ever does with *right now*."-pg 138-9
Maggie Osborne - Silver Lining
All my life I dreamed of having someone think I was beautiful.
Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream...
Plamen Chetelyazov - Flaws of Oblivion
The person in love finds only a dream, a notion, an ideal. You fall in love with nothing but your own dreams—the only carriers of your true longings. Sometimes you manage to personify your dreams in another. Sometimes it’s not a single-player game. This doesn’t make love any less primal or selfish.
Garth Nix - Lirael
"It always seemed somehow less real here... a really detailed dream, but sort of washed out, like a thin watercolor. Softer, somehow, even with their electric light and engines and everything. I guess it was because there was hardly any magic.
John Geddes -
The only difference between you and a dream is I haven’t woken up with you
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets
What the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
James Baldwin -
I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea.
Cecilia Llompart - The Wingless
Consider my Lover; the yellow churchof his skin, the clean wells of his ears;How the notes of a song come to himlike birds descending on a power line;How in his absence I am of twothroats--each of them cramped.
Robert Burns -
My heart is sair-I dare na tell,My heart is sair for Somebody.
Alfred Hayes - In Love
There were times when I would forget her, though they were rare, and it would be for a time as though she had never existed; and then some passing girl's inadvertent gesture, or an accidental profile, or a hat like hers, would restore her, and restore the suffering too, and I would long again, somehow, to encounter or to see her.
Alfred Hayes - In Love
She inhabited a world from which I was excluded, and she had left me in an immense empty space.
Mordecai Richler - Barney's Version
And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?
Dinesh Kumar Biran -
She wore his flowerIn her hairScent of amberSweetened the airHer dress was whiteHer feet bareHe found heavenWaiting thereShe is aliveIn his painful sigh...
Julie Johnson - The Monday Girl
Grayson Dunn is in my head. He's under my skin. He's invaded me like a deadly disease and hijacked my immune system until I don't even bother fighting it anymore. I look at him, and I'm twisted into knots. Tangled into a messy spool of desire and desperation.
C.J. Carlyon - The Cherry House
She was the wish of his life. He didn’t know how else to say it. He didn’t even know that he could really explain, just that every time he saw her he felt his bones might break under the weight of his wanting. His longing for her.
Jalaluddin Rumi -
There is some kiss we want with our whole lives, the touch of spirit on the body. Seawaterbegs the pearl to break its shell.and the lily, how passionatelyit needs some wild darling! Atnight, I open the window and askthe moon to come and press itsface against mine. Breathe intome. Close the language door andopen the lovers window. The moonwon’t use the door, only the window.
Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice
It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights – but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.
Dinesh Kumar Biran -
She is the ocean, gentle, smooth and calm on the surface…I am the fooling diver, braving her deep, dark, dangerous depth…
Jasper Fforde - The Woman Who Died a Lot
All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn't so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause.
Richelle E. Goodrich - Making Wishes
Be careful what you wish for. It may turn out that making the wish was the only good part.
Richelle E. Goodrich - Making Wishes
If only you would kiss me.Press your lips to mine like a searing iron. Wrap me in your arms as if you were a monarch claiming a kingdom. Hold me close until I warm through to the core. Do this, and I promise to melt into you, no longer a cold and frozen figure in your narrowed sight. How devoted I would be if only your lips burned for mine!If only you would kiss me.
Richelle E. Goodrich -
Be not wishing and pining but thankfully content. For it is a short bridge between wanting and regret."- from "Dimpellumpzki
Trevor Driggers -
Sometimes, we want what we want. Even if we know it's going to kill us.
Marianne Escobar -
MOMENTSI saw you firstYou looked exactly The same as beforeTall and awkward and shyI walked towards youMy hands clammy I felt cold insideMy insides were shakingCant runThis is it.U saw meYour face brightenedA smile painted on your faceI missed itYour smileIt brought back the pastYou walkedI walkedNearerIt feels like in theMoviesTwo peopleA boy and a girlMeeting halfwayHoping for a happyEver afterI stopped Right before I reached youI realizedThis isn't like the moviesI turnedI told myselfDon’t sm
John Geddes - A Familiar Rain
... this longing inside me that never goes away, must be a poem...must be you ...
Katherine McIntyre - Snatched
Being inside this cottage, with dark wooden walls and hand-carved furniture like my own home, cast a darkened stain onto my heart.
Will Advise -
Nostalgia is a longing for your home.
Hermann Hesse - Wandering
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.
Mary Oliver - Long Life: Essays and Other Writings
I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life — that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry. I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong. Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding. Other words that come to mind: faith, grace, rest. In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change — there’s never been a day that my friends haven’t been able to say, and at a distance, “There’s
Kamila Shamsie -
We should have stories in common, I found myself thinking. We should have stories, and jokes no one understands, and memories that we know will stay alive because neither of us will let the other forget.
John Steinbeck - with Occasional Reference to History
There was no desire in him for a state or condition, no picture in his mind of the thing to be when he had followed his longing; but only a burning and a will overpowering to journey outward and outward after the earliest risen star.
Paulo Coelho -
Men dream more about coming home than about leaving.
Brian Bowers - Shadows Chasing Light
Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pullback the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatnessof this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewnacross the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist—mysoul purpose.
Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey
I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Tr
Shannon L. Alder -
The man that is meant to love you will have a million questions about you, but none will ever ask your value.