Quotes About Yearning

She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . .

From the screen, a huge white face had looked at him, a face with a mouth one wished one could wish to kiss, and eyes that made one wonder—a wonder which was pain—just what it was they were seeing. He felt as if there was something—deep in his brain, behind everything he thought and everything he was—which he did not know, but she knew, and he wished he did, and wondered whether he could ever know it, and should he, if he could, and why he wished

They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape.

They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up.

Her work was all she had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still.

God, I've missed you! he said, and knew that he had, every day since he'd seen her last and most of all, perhaps on the days when he had not thought of her

For five days and nights, she had fought a single desire—to go to him. To see him alone—anywhere—his home or his office or the street—for one word or only one glance—but alone.

I will have no claim to make except that I need you so much. And that I love you. I told you once not to consider it. Now I'll use it as a tin cup.

To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his . . . No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired . . . A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience . . .

I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. Do you know what it's like? To want it? The lowest of all desires - as my answer to the highest I've met. You trusted me, didn't you? To think of you as you deserve. Don't you suppose I know how much I've betrayed? I want you - and may I be damned for it! - Atlas Shrugged

He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. "What do you want?" he asked.

There were moments when she felt a sudden, violent longing for him, but it was only impatience, not pain.

He felt, as passionately as he had ever felt it, that she was the most desirable woman on earth; but what came from it was only a desire to desire her, a wish to feel, not a feeling.

She moved her hand and let it rest against his. He did not withdraw his fingers and he did not pretend indifference. She bent over, holding his hand, not raising it from his knee, and she pressed her lips to his hand. Her hat fell off, he saw the blond head at his knees, he felt her mouth kissing his hand again and again. His fingers held hers, answering, but that was the only answer.

El hombre existe para la consecución de sus deseos.

He wanted to put his head down on the desk, lie still and rest, only the form of rest he needed did not exist, greater than sleep, greater than death, the rest of having never lived.

I eat my heart out alone.

I always had a hankering for the security of impossible dreams.

More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is.You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess.

right; maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape. An escape from poverty or boredom or crime or the shackles of your skin.

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

But I missed my wife. I missed my kids. I missed my bed, a consistent shower, sitting at a proper table for a proper meal. I missed not having to say the exact same thing the exact same way five or six or seven times a day.

To be held behind walls, however comfortable the surroundings, is a torment for someone who wants to leave. It is better than a dungeon, of course, but you are not your own master.

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand.