Quotes About Yearning

Sex is what you can get. For some people, for most people it's the most important thing they can get without being born rich or famous or stealing.

My heart has followed, all my days, something I cannot name.

Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.

Queremos que el Padre Muerto esté muerto. Nos sentamos con los ojos llenos de lágrimas y deseamos que el Padre Muerto esté muerto… y entretanto hacemos cosas asombrosas con las manos.

he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.

I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

Longing is different than need. Needing to solve plot problems can kick protagonists into action, but that's not the same thing as forging a human bond. What does that is inner yearning.

Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.

We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status. It's written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn't, and if only this and only that, it would be beautiful again.

the words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language...those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

And that's the tricky thing about life, really, that the things we want most will kill us.

I longed for glory. I remember nothing of my childhood more than my fervor for tales of glory and my plans to travel the world in quest of fame.

The catalyst for any story is that the hero wants something.

The idea is that you place a gap between a character and what they want.

I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely, like me. My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come into the knowing of each other?

Even if exile is spent in the most beautiful city in the world, Brunetti realized, it is still exile.

After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.

Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.

my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.

isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?

Or rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she'd been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall. Sometimes I spotted her in a crowd, or in a taxicab pulling away, and these glimpses of her I treasured despite the fact that I was never able to catch up with her.

I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.

Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.