Quotes About Yearning

I wanted to wake him and see those eyes open. A thousand thousand times I had seen it, but I never tired of it.

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like spring-water, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in the summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this.

Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.

I knew I was a fool. Even if he stayed past that spring to the next, such a man could never be happy closed up on my narrow shores.

The bed felt cold without him, and too large. I heard no sounds, and the stillness frightened me. It is like a tomb. I rose and rubbed my limbs, slapped them awake, trying to ward of a rising hysteria. This is what it will be, every day, without him. I felt a wild-eyed tightness in my chest, like a scream. Every day, without him.

I came for her, but there was no one who would come for me. The thought was steadying. After all, I had been alone my whole life.

And that's when I'm supposed to open my eyes like a dewy fawn, and see him poised over me like the sun, and make a little gasping noise of wonder and gratitude, and then he fucks me.

My chest trilled with something I could not quite name. Escape, and danger, and hope all at once.

There is this, too." His hand was ceaseless now. "I know I have told you of this." I closed my eyes. "Tell me again," I said.

At least once a dinner he would turn and catch me before I could feign indifference. Those seconds, half seconds, that the line of our gaze connected, were the only moment in my day that I felt anything at all.

He talked so often of longing for us and home. But it was lies. When he was back on Ithaca he was never content, always looking to the horizon. Once we were his again, he wanted something else.

The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.

Later, Achilles sleeps next to me. Odysseus' storm has come, and the coarse fabric of the tent wall trembles with its force. I hear the stinging slap, over and over, of waves reproaching the shore. He stirs and the air stirs with him, bearing the musk-sweet smell of his body. I think: This is what I will miss. I think: I will kill myself rather than miss it. I think: How long do we have?

I had not fooled myself with false hope. I was a goddess, and he was a mortal, and both of us were imprisoned. But I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.

He ran from me whenever I wanted him, but the moment I took up my work, he would drum at the floor with his heels, crying for my attention.

I found myself wishing he would wake so that I might watch the life return.

Yet some say lovers are mad.

We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence. Later, Achilles pressed close for a final, drowsy whisper. "If you have to go, you know I will go with you." We slept.

where there was greed there was hope.

I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as starts once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me

He wanted to see how moonish I was over him. But all the sop in me was gone. I did not lie dreaming of him during the days, I did not speak his name into my pillow.

A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.