Quotes About Yearning

You may think it is one thing, when in fact it is something else entirely: infatuation, loneliness, seduction.

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

She acted as though I were a stranger when I appeared. "Did you want something?" she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

She was inexperienced enough to assume what they had was love because she wanted him, and want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense.

I would watch his footprints when he went and mourn him before he was gone.

All I wanted was to be somebody else. Was that asking too much? Was that asking for everything?

That's all someone in the grip of obsession needs: the single possibility that desire might be real, a tiny shred of evidence to show you're not all alone in the dark.

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

Just like you still think you'll be happier if you run away.

was a spectacular and lonely landscape that I wished my father could see. I wished he could take off his shoes and climb over the rocks and wave to me and that he would be here in this world once again, if only for a few hours.

The strangest thing about her was the way she gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living.

When a man I like touches my arm or my hair, I want to know if he'll touch the center of me, and whatever I learned in school--I went to school for a long time--I seem to believe that my center can be reached best with the tip of a penis....

dull—she did not, with equal longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the edge of other, more interesting lives. She

He leaned toward her, slowly raising his hand to his hat and then doffing it quickly, as if taken by surprise, when she leaned forward to meet him. And this, she thought, of course, was what the whole evening had been for, the delightful feel of his rough cheek against her fingertips, his hands and lips and warm breath. The lingering taste of coffee in his mouth. Something

There wasn't a tear to be seen on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them walked down to Schrafft's. Only him, again, leaning by the door, suit jacket and fedora, the sunlight striking gold, the leg he had favored bent back and pressed against the building. He was smoking a cigarette. He was the handsomest man on the block. He was waiting for her.

There was the ache in his heart, and now over his shoulder and down his arm, as

Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.

My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.

What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.

I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide--sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to[...] It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper.

There ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for--but never did get to see.

She would lean her head against the back pillow of the sofa, thinking that she lay in his arms. You would not think that she'd remember his face but it would spring up in detail, the face of a creased and rather tired-looking, satirical, indoor sort of man. Nor was his body lacking, it was presented as reasonably worn but competent, and uniquely desirable.

Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft -- a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.

She didn't really plan to travel there. She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.