Quotes About Yearning

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.5

Every man, whatsoever his condition, desires to be happy. There is no man who does not desire this, and each one desires it with such earnestness that he prefers it to all other things; whoever, in fact, desires other things, desires them for this end alone.

My wants are many, and, if told, would muster many a score; and were each wish a mint of gold, I still would want for more.

The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.

As Julian of Norwich put it, "And thus I saw God, and sought God. I had God, and at the same time I wanted God. And this is, and should be, what we are all working towards."1

Maybe I could love you. But I wont. The grinding streets awaited me.

Isnt it possible that wanting to be wanted Ã¢â'¬Â¦ or 'loved' Ã¢â'¬Â¦ could be as much an aspect of what you call 'love' as actually loving back?" I said. "I mean, in choosing someone to 'love' you—to be loved by—while that other person chooses you to 'love'—doesnt one complete the need of the other?

Because somewhere in that plain of childhood time must have been planted the seeds of the restlessness.

Keep striving and searching for greater realization. Through that yearning the problems of execution will be solved.

This is desire, daughter, the endless piercing that informs the universe throughout eternity,

I do not dream anymore, nor do I sleep. My days are empty, my nights endless. My only thought is of her, this murderer. But despite what you say, she brings me life.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

Sex. Love. The lack of both was like two deprivations from two deep and timeless wells.

I prithee send me back my heart, Since I cannot have thine; For if from yours you will not part, Why, then, shouldst thou have mine?

Restless, he begs for storms, As though in storms there is rest.

One suspects he disdained the traditional preparations of drawing and modeling in favor of cutting straight into the marble containing the captive soul yearning for release. The result is a kind of metaphor perhaps unconscious for the struggle of artistic creation. The only way Michelangelo could show us this was to leave the figure half-embedded in the rock.

Are you the thing you want most, or its' opposite? If I want nothing more than water, is it because I am water or because I have none?

I always wanted to be a juvenile delinquent but my parents wouldn't let me.

She was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.

it led his eyes outward and upward into the sky, where he looked as if toward a possibility for which he had no name.

But we were never really - together. Even when we made love.

coming home early only when his loneliness for a brief glimpse of his daughter, or a word with her, made it impossible for him to stay away.

He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something—even pain—to pierce him, to bring him alive.

He felt at times that he was kind of a vegetable and he longed for something--even pain-- to pierce him, to bring him alive.