Quotes About Yearning

I wish to go beyond the fire that burns me.

To be able to say how much love, is love but little.

He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre] ~ Petrarch, Sonnet 137 (from Montaigne, On sadness)

Uncover what you long for and you will discover who you are.

Once in a while, I found flint arrowheads in the muddy creek bank. Looking at them, I would dream of that savage, heroic time and wish I had lived then, before America became a land of salesmen and shopping centers.

That is what I wanted, to find in a commonplace world a chance to live heroically. Having known nothing but security, comfort, and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges, and violence.

Sometimes what we think we need isn't what we need at all, and what gets thrown in for good measure is that which fills our hearts.

But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.

Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

The person I am now, compared with the person in the dream, has been baffled and defeated and only supposes he enjoys a full life. In the dreams, I see what a full life really consists of, and it is not what I really have.

She sighed. Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That's what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.

I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.(Mercer)

We are all insects," he said to Miss Ephreikian. "Groping toward something terrible or divine. Do you not agree?

Secretaries, he thought acidly, read that junk, at home alone in bed at night. It stimulates them. Instead of the real thing. Which they're afraid of. But of course really crave.

He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article.

What do you want? Egg in your beer?

I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want to dial, I don't want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.

He awoke—and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely. "Are

He felt the craving within him, the need to be entertained. And they all felt this way; the settlement yearned for the bizarre.

Once, he thought, I would have seen the stars. Years ago. But now it's only the dust; no one has seen a star in years, at least not from Earth. Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

You will have to stop searching for me because l will never stop searching for you.

Aimer un esprit, voilà le véritable martyre. Le désespoir incarné. Le nom de Donna ne serait imprimé sur aucune page, il n'apparaîtrait nulle part dans les annales de l'humanité. Disparue sans laisser d'adresse. Il y a des filles comme ça, et c'est celles-là qu'on aime le plus, celles qui ne permettent pas d'espérer, car elles vous échappent alors même que vous refermer vos bras autour d'elles.

Tripping across a country pasture with Junie Black... spreading out a blanket on the hot, dry hillside, among the smells of grass and afternoon sun. No, not there. Is that gone, too? Hollow outward form instead of substance; the sun not actually shining, the day not actually warm at all but cold, gray and quietly raining.