Quotes About Yearning

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

Sometimes, taking a break and going somewhere else and, almost, for both parties, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky; and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

I'd see my daddy about once a month, and I missed him. I would have loved to have had more of him. He was tall, attractive and very quiet, very gentle. He had a wife who I don't think ever really liked me much.

Or even wanted to experience! But

Can you imagine a silence so desperate to be heard?

There are desires we haven't named yet, loves so impossible they have to be true. — Richard Jackson, from "Incompleteness," The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2022)

Is there any way we can purely touch the world again, the way a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into hoping to emerge into a world where—where what? There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret, no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

It's the cliff I climb when the moon is you.

There are times when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read what is written on the far sides of stars. — Richard Jackson, from "Alternate Endings," Resonance (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

I have only these words that seem as if they climbed up from the bottom of a dry well.

Fuck me. I'm a rock star. And all I really wanted was a burrito.

How long has it been since I've seen sunlight? Down in the asshole of creation, it was a dim, perpetual crimson-and-magenta twilight.

Perhaps one stops smoking only when one starts to love cigarettes, becoming so enamored of their charms and so grateful for their benefits that one at last begins to grasp how much is lost by giving them up, how urgent it is to find substitutes for some of the seductions and powers that cigarettes so magnificently combine.

Trapped inside the snotrag," Keith said, "is a crumb of angel food trying to get out." Lana

And then something comes over you, and then suddenly it's as if you lift off the planet, and you're far above, looking down, and you've got to find this person, like the needle in the proverbial haystack. It's very strange. I could never express what that felt like. The feeling when you've lost something- that's bad enough. But when you've lost someone, it's awful.

If to be absent were to beAway from thee;Or that when I am gone,You and I were alone;Then, my Lucasta, might I cravePity from blust'ring wind, or swallowing wave.

I will always try To hold my head up to the sky If only just to let you know That straight from my heart I still miss you so.

But it was hard to keep his hands still. He could almost feel them twitching emphatically with his strong desire to reach out and stroke the dog's head. He had such a terrible yearning to love something again, and the dog was such a beautiful ugly dog.

To want any one thing too much is barbaric.

I believe that in spite of the chains we bind ourselves with, there's a primordial section of the human psyche that is still nomadic and still yearns to roam free.

I once heard it said that everyone needs love-and if they're denied, they'll find it, or a reasonable substitute somewhere.

We live in a world that's always making us work for love.