Quotes About Yearning

Wanting to want something isn't the same as wanting it. I suppose what I really wanted, then, was to give more of a shit, because about certain things, I simply did not.

How can you really miss something when you never experienced it?

Our phone bills were astronomical, and when I found the letters Frank wrote me the other day, the total could fill a suitcase. Every single day during our relationship, no matter where in the world I was, I'd get a telegram from Frank saying he loved me and missed me. He was a man who was deseperate for companionship and love. Can you wonder that he always had mine!

Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...

Did I feel a physical desire for him? I did. Was I moved by a passion of my body? I was. Have I experienced the most violent form of sensual pleasure? I have.

You have forbidden me to look for you, you may damn me, you may choose to discard me...but by the right of the fact that I am alive, I must know that you are...I must see you this once. - Dagny Taggart

It was beautiful and rare, and you have every right to despise me. She stood pressed to the wall, not moving. When you came in, I thought 'Send her away.' But I knew that if you went away, I'd run after you. I thought 'I won't say a word.' But I knew that you'd know it before you left. I love you. I know you'd think kindlier of me if I said that I hate you.

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

You, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon—

She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the window-pane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.

She felt a board indifference toward the immediate world around her toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait she thought, and grow up to that world. - Dagny Taggart

whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.

her face lay still on the air under his face...

She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.

and the desire would never be satisfied, except by a being of equal greatness.

I've wanted to want it. I should think it would be exciting to become a dissolute woman.

It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own.

I want to drink. I want a woman like you. I want to go down, as far as you can drag me.

there's something in me that knows of a life I've never lived, the kind of a life no one has ever lived, but should." "You know it? Why don't you live it?

I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands...I want you like an animal...or a whore.

Although many pairs of lips spoke her name, none ever brought its reality to her.

No confiéis en aquellos de vosotros que consideran que única y simplemente anheláis la inmortalidad, porque aunque estén diciendo la verdad, no es esta sino superficial e incompleta. La inmortalidad del individuo no os saciaría. Siempre exigís más, aunque no seáis capaces de denominar el objeto de vuestro deseo.