Quotes About Yearning

The place where what someone needs and what she desires cross each other to become one.

Believers with nothing to believe in.

Every step I took hurt, I walked on daggers, on hot blue fire. Not holding him was like not breathing, not being quite alive. As

Desire had a way of making a person oddly courageous. In the aunts' opinion, it could sneak up on a grown woman and turn her from a sensible creature into something as foolish as a flea that keeps chasing after the same old dog.

and want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense. She

Have you ever felt that you lost something, and you can't get it back? As though it's been stolen right out from under you? Sure, the barman said. It's called life.

How could I lose you when I haven't even found you?

Sometimes the most dangerous thing of all in matters of love was to be granted your heart's desire.

I read books as though I were eating apples, core and all, starved for those pages, hungry for every word that told me about things I didn't yet have, but still wanted terribly, wanted until it hurt.

What I wanted to know had both nothing and everything to do with the natural world. I wished to know love.

And yet he imagined leaping into the blue-green water, thousands of miles from here, in a land where no one followed the rules set forth, where a sin might float like a flower in a fountain and a man was free to do as he pleased.

what she misses most is someone knowing she's alive

Loneliness can drive even the most alienated person to attempt to make cotact with another soul, even when it's via a soullness medium.

thought if I ever fell in love, I would want my beloved to wish what I had come to wish, that the book had ended differently, so that the first Mrs. Rochester might have made her escape.

her soul was in her mouth, ready to escape as a puff of air

Shelby loves Maravelle; she wishes she could spend the night in Valley Stream, but being with Maravelle and her mother would only make her sadder. She doesn't have a mother anymore. There's no one to whom she's the most important person in the world.

Would you like to have a brother? By now Melek knew much of our language. I would like to have you, he told me. I laughed, but the laughter sounded sharp, like a rock against the both of us, or an arrow, one that could indeed pierce through flesh. I know I can't. So instead I'll have a brother.

If she felt my gaze upon her, I assume she was accustomed to being stared at, just as I was used to wanting what I could not have.

Did you want something?" she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

Is it the man you want, or the feeling inside you when someone cares?

We were no different from the doves above us. We could not speak or cry, but when there was no choice, we discovered we could fly. If you want a reason, take this: We yearned for our portion of the sky (p.397).

Was this what love did? Make you so grateful for a word or two that you'd practically beg for such things to be said?

Doesn't everyone want what they cannot have?

This is the way it happens. You walk into a room with blue walls. You kiss a man in the garden. You feel your heart and bones and blood. You wait for him like a bird in a cage.