Quotes About Yearning

Now every mortal has pain and sweat is constant, but if there is anything dearer than being alive, it's dark to me. We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth-- we call it life. We know no other. The underworld's a blank and all the rest just fantasy.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country. I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape

I am a restrained person. Otherwise my heart would race past my tongue to pour out everything. Instead I mumble, I gnaw myself. I lose hope. And my mind is burning.

I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.

The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not

I walk and walk with cold hands. Back at the house it is filled with longing, nothing to carry longing away. I look back over my life. I try to find analogies. There are none. I have longed for people before, I have loved people before. Not like this. It was not this.

You are a person in love with the impossible

Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.

Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.

Nighthawks I wanted to run away with you tonight but you are a difficult woman the rules of you - Past and future circle round us now we know more now less in the institute of shadows. On a street black as widows with nothing to confess our distances found us the rules of you - so difficult a woman I wanted to run away with you tonight.

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty. What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Like the dogs, names, down there, starving.

You can have your rich table and life flowing over the cup. I need one food: I must not violate Elektra.

The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions

I loved him for his beauty. As I would again if he came near. Beauty convinces.

Whenever I visit my mother I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, my lonely life around me like a moor, my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation that dies when I come into the kitchen door. What meat is it, Emily, we need?

his voice saying, You beauty. I can feel that beauty's heart beating inside mine as she presses into his arms in the high blue room–

It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

He felt Herakles' hand move on his thigh and Geryon's head went back like a poppy in a breeze --

The fact that Anna is somewhere having coffee or a dream is an assault on me. I hate these moments of poverty, What does man eat? ask the phenomenologists. Likes the dogs, names, down there, starving.

What's here doesn't please you, what's far off you crave. Anne Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

I've come to understand the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with the space where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.