Quotes About Yearning

What We Want What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.

I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. [from "After an Absence"]

I need someone real, who will be right for me now, here, and soon. Until then I'm lost. I think I am mad at times." Because

She was a child robbed of her beloved sea and shore

I miss you every time that we say goodbye, even though I know I will see you the next day. I miss you when you are across the room, and I can see you. I miss you when you sit beside me and I cannot touch you.

There is a strange feeling of longing that I have always had, always a desire to be someplace better than where I am. But the world I want to enter is always disappearing before I get there.

I like my women in a few wisps of drapery: then I can hope for a chance to remove the wisps.

What I want to do is travel deep and deeper into the dreamlands, to find that place that I know is waiting for me here. My home.

I always feel that there is a curtain, you know, that if I could just peek behind the curtain I'd see how the world really works. And since I haven't had it I have to write about it instead.

We chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

It was not living, it was vegetation. We longed for death.

Come! our world is done: For all the witchery of the world is fled, And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

I am in flight from my story every day, and it dogs me like a faithful stray.

So when I said I'd miss him, I meant I would miss what we had not experienced, and I don't know what that's called: nostalgia for what didn't happen.

Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it.

Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere crust on her limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers.

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

I wondered if that wasn't the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn't that eating was so great-it wasn't-but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay.

Se supone que los hombres piensan en el sexo todo el tiempo, pero él ya no lo hacía, y ahora lo recordaba con tanta fuerza que dolía.

the definition of the truly foreign locale is one that fosters a piercing and perpetual yearning to go home.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

This was the pattern of my life: to love men who didn't deserve me, and, knowing that, to yearn for their love anyway.