Quotes About Yearning

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked.

Any man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.

I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.

A picture postcard is a symptom of loneliness.

Sometimes I would walk with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.

I wondered whether she would consent to sleep with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew that when I had smoked four pipes I would no longer want her.

I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

There I go again. I want. I don't want. If I could love You, I could love Henry. God was made man. He was Henry with his astigmatism, Richard with his spots, not only Maurice. If I could love a leper's sores, couldn't I love the boringness of Henry? But I'd turn from the leper if he were here, I suppose, as I shut myself away from Henry. I want the dramatic always. I imagine I'm ready for the pain of your nails... Dear God, I'm no use. I'm still the same bitch and fake. Clear me out of the way.

That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape--anywhere--for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now—not desire, but only the reminder of it?

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it.

She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

You sacrificed both of us once to bring me back to life, but what sort of a life is this without you.

Männer, die die Stadt für immer verlassen hatten, erinnerten sich manchmal an einem grauen, naßkalten Abend in London des rosigen Schimmers und der glühenden Pracht, die, kaum gesehen, auch schon wieder verblichen; sie fragten sich dann, warum sie die Küste so gehaßt hatten, und solange sie einen Tropfen im Glase hatten, sehnten sie sich danach, dorthin zurückzukehren.

I wanted her mind, now I wanted to read her thoughts, but they were hidden away in a language I couldn't speak.

She was too beautiful to excite me with the idea of accessibility.

People can love without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in at the door, and he was alive, and I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.

Not all of it was done by soldiers, or by men. She'd shut her eyes and run her fingers over Jack's shoulders, down his spine, as a blind person might seek to recognise the shape of something. The shape—the ache in her own flesh—of her love for him.

The only reason he can miss you is because he's choosing, every day, not to be with you.

Even chitlins smell good to a starving man.

It's funny to love someone so much that it hurts.

I should have gotten a dog.