Quotes About Yearning

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

An hour or so later he received a note from Odette. Swann had left his cigarette case at her house. "If only," she wrote, "you had also forgotten your heart! I should never have let you have it back.

when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them;

On n'aime que ce qu'on ne possède pas tout entier.

my house contains every useless thing in the world. it lacks only the one essential, a piece of sky like this one...

I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.

It was she whom I loved and whom I could not therefore see without that anxiety, without that desire for something more, which destroys in us, in the presence of the person we love, the sensation of loving.

I was genuinely in love with Mme. de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that He should overwhelm her under every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that divided her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for refuge. I imagined her doing so.

Only that which is absent can be imagined.

L'amour commence, on voudrait rester pour celle qu'on aime l'inconnu qu'elle peut aimer mais on a besoin d'elle, on a besoin de toucher moins son corps que son attention, son coeur.

which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace.

there are things in our souls which we know not how much they mean to us. Or rather, if we live without them, it is because, either through fear of failing or suffering, we daily postpone the moment of coming under their thrall.

When we are kept waiting, we suffer so keenly from the absence of the person for whom we are longing that we cannot endure the presence of anyone else.

In the case of the solitary, his seclusion, even when it is absolute and ends only with life itself, has often as its primary cause a disordered love of the crowd, which so far overruled every other feeling that, not being able to win, when he goes out, the admiration of his hall-porter, of the passers-by, of the cabman whom he hails, he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.

And at once I fell in love with her, for if it is sometimes enough to make us love a woman that she should look on us with contempt, as I supposed Mlle Swann to have done, and that we should think that she can never be ours, sometimes, too, it is enough that she should look on us kindly, as Mme de Guermantes was doing, and that we should think of her as almost ours already.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting point for further desires. in a chapter called Desire and Despair

Quantas pessoas, cidades, caminhos, não nos torna assim o ciúme ávidos de conhecer? Ele é uma sede de saber graças à qual, sobre pontos isolados uns dos outros, acabamos tendo sucessivamente todas as noções possíveis, exceto as que desejaríamos.

Creer que una persona participa de una vida incógnita, cuyas puertas nos abriría su cariño, es todo lo que exige el amor para brotar, lo que más estima, y aquello por lo que cede todo lo demás.

Anzi, da un punto di vista puramente realistico, i paesi che noi desideriamo tengono in ogni istante assai più posto nella nostra esistenza vera, dei paesi dove abitiamo in realtà.

Quando Odette deixasse de ser para ele uma criatura sempre ausente, cobiçada, imaginária, quando o sentimento que ele tinha por ela não fosse mais aquela mesma perturbação misteriosa que lhe causava a frase da sonata e sim afeto, reconhecimento, quando se estabelecessem entre ambos relações normais que poriam fim à loucura e à tristeza dele, então sem dúvida os atos da vida de Odette lhe pareceriam si mesmos pouco interessantes.

the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...