Quotes About Yearning

Nothing is worthwhile, my distant love, except knowing how sweet it is to know that nothing is worthwhile

Every part of me is a vague nostalgia neither for the past nor for the future: the whole of me is a nostalgia for the anonymous, prolix, unfathomable present.

I open the window. Everything outside is so gentle, yet it pierces me with an indefinable pain, a vague feeling of discontent.

Love, glory, and wealth are prisons.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life. I love life too much to want it to be over; I love not living too much to have an active craving for life.

I want you only for my dreams,' they tell the beloved woman in verses they never send – they who dare not tell her anything. This 'I want you only for my dreams' is a verse from an old poem of mine. I record the memory with a smile, and don't even comment on the smile.

I have in me like a haze Which holds and which is nothing A nostalgia for nothing at all, The desire for something vague. — Fernando Pessoa, opening lines to "[I have in me like a haze]," trans. Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998)

Wanting to go and die in Peking and not being able to is something that weighs on me like the idea of some imminent cataclysm.

Eres lo que falta a todo. Eres lo que falta a cada cosa para poder amarla por siempre. Llave extraviada de las puertas del Templo, camino encubierto del Palacio, Isla lejana que la bruma nunca deja ver...

Since I cannot live without affection, why was that affection taken from me?

Fly, bird, fly away; teach me to disappear! from The Keeper of the Sheep

Ah! Querem uma luz melhor que a do Sol! Querem prados mais verdes do que estes! Querem flores mais belas do que estas que vejo! A mim este Sol, estes prados, estas flores, contentam-me. Mas, se acaso me descontentam, O que quero é um sol mais sol que o Sol, O que quero é prados mais prados que estes prados, O que quero é flores mais estas flores que estas flores — Tudo mais ideal do que é do mesmo modo e da mesma maneira!

No sueño con poseerte. ¿Para qué? Sería traducir a plebeyo mi sueño. Poseer un cuerpo es ser banal. Soñar con poseer un cuerpo es tal vez peor, aunque sea difícil serlo: es soñarse banal, horror supremo.

It is not tedium that one feels. It is not grief. It is the desire to go to sleep clothed in a different personality, to forget, dulled by an increase in salary.

We are hollow inside and out, pariahs of anticipation and promise.

Del amor sólo he exigido que nunca dejase de ser un sueño lejano.

He vivido tanto sin haber vivido! ¡He pensado tanto sin haber pensado! Pesan sobre mí mundos de violencias detenidas, de aventuras vividas sin movimiento. Estoy harto de lo que nunca he tenido ni tendré, tedioso de dioses por existir. Llevo conmigo las heridas de todas las batallas que he evitado. Mi cuerpo muscular está molido por el esfuerzo que no he podido hacer.

Não se pode comer um bolo sem o perder.

No he hecho más que soñar. Ése ha sido y sigue siendo, incluso, el sentido de mi vida. Nunca he tenido otra preocupación verdadera que no fuese mi vida interior. Los mayores dolores de mi vida se desvanecen cuando, al abrir la ventana hacia la calle de mis sueños, consigo enajenarme en la visión de su movimiento.

I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I'm just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.

Ik heb nooit meer van het leven verlangd dan dat dat niets van mij zou eisen.

Siempre he pertenecido a lo que no está donde estoy y a lo que no he podido ser nunca.

Love is a mysticism that wants to be put into practice, an impossibility that according to our dreams should be possible.

I feel nostalgia for the possibility of one day feeling nostalgia, regardless of how absurd that nostalgia may seem.