Quotes About Yearning

For old age makes us incapable of performing our duties but not, at first, of desiring them.

There must be something inaccessible in what we love, something to pursue; we love only what we do not possess, and soon I began once more to realize that I did not possess Albertine.

Having had time to come, Albertine must have arrived. I went straight to Françoise: "Is Mlle Albertine here?" "No one has come." Good God, did that mean that no one would be coming? I was in torment, Albertine's visit now seeming all the more desirable for being less certain.

The only true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

The constant vision of this imaginary happiness helped me to bear the ruining of my real happiness. With a woman who does not love us, as with someone who has died, the knowledge that there is nothing left to hope for does not prevent us from going on waiting.

For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of waiting for Eulalie became a torture,

But above all my anguish was incomparably stronger this time, for many reasons, of which the most important was not perhaps that I had never tasted sensual pleasure with Mme de Guermantes or with Gilberte, but that since I did not see them every hour of every day and had no opportunity, and consequently experienced no need, to do so, my love for them lacked the all-powerful element of Habit.

Pois desde que se está enamorado, todos os pequenos privilégios desconhecidos que a gente possui, desejaria poder divulgá-los à mulher a quem ama, como fazem na vida os deserdados e os importunos. Sentimos que ela os ignore, procuramos consolar-nos dizendo conosco mesmos que, justamente porque não são jamais visíveis, talvez ela acrescente à ideia que tem de nós essa possibilidade de vantagens desconhecidas.

love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come)?

We dream a great deal of paradise, or, rather, of numerous successive paradises, but they are all, long before we die, paradises lost, in which we would feel lost.

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!

Our love becomes immense; we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though love had abruptly vanished at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to whose value we had not given enough thought before

I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would like to touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it;

Pode-se ter inclinação por uma pessoa. Mas para desencadear essa tristeza, esse sentimento do irreparável, essas angústias, que preparam o amor, é preciso - e talvez isso e não a pessoa amada seja o ansiado objeto da paixão - o risco de uma impossibilidade.

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?

we love only that in which we pursue something inaccessible, we love only what we do not possess,

Tuo metu aš buvau ?simyl?j?s teatr?, žinoma, platoniška meile, nes t?vai dar niekad nebuvo leid? man tenai nueiti, ir tok? menk? tetur?jau supratim?, kas tai per malonumas, kad bemaž tik?jau, jog teatre kiekvienas ži?ri tartum pro stereoskop? ? dekoracijas, rodomas jam vienam, nors ir visai panašias ? t?kstan?ius kit?, kurias mato visi ži?rovai, tiktai kiekvienas atskirai.

Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves!

My darling, dear Marcel, I return less quickly than this cyclist, whose machine I would like to borrow in order to be with you sooner. How could you imagine that I might be angry or that I could enjoy anything better than to be with you? It will be nice to go out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer still if we never went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine.

With women who do not love Us, as with the 'missing,' the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent our continuing to wait for news. We live on tenterhooks, starting at the slightest sound

The only true paradise is a paradise lost

But if Mme. Sherbatoff did not look at the audience, remained in shadow, it was to try to forget that there existed a living world which she passionately desired and was unable to know

At the very beginning of love, as at its end, we are not exclusively attached to a single beloved: it is the yearning to love, of which that person will be the loved outcome, and later the echo left in the memory, that wanders voluptuously in a place full of charms—sometimes deriving only from contingencies of nature, bodily pleasures, or habitation—interchangeable and interrelated enough for it to feel in harmony with any of them.

thus, in a wild desire to hurl myself into her arms, it was only at this instant—more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings—that I had just learned she was dead.