Quotes About Yearning

Return to your longing. It will teach you everything.

Every little thing wants to be loved

All this love coming to me. I didn't know what to do with it. I wanted to say, I love you, too. I love you all. The feeling rose up in me like a column of wind, but when it got to my mouth, it had no voice, no words. Just a lot of air and longing.

I hope for everything.

It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I'd honestly thought such a thing couldn't happen, the way water could not run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. A law of nature. Maybe it was a simple matter of being attracted to what I couldn't have.

Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign, torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become someone.

I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I'd once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.

I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be.

We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all.

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

Then you called me daughter. You called out your love." She went and knelt beside Yaltha's chair. "I cannot forget that you left me. That knowledge will always remain in a corner of me, but I wish to let myself be loved.

Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d'art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.

There was so much in the world to be had and not had.

Yaltha's words returned to me: You have your destiny, too. They stirred the old longings in me, the terrible need for my own life.

Aunt-Sister would've said, 'Let her go, it's past the time,' but I wanted the pain of mauma's face and hands more than the peace of being without them.

I looked at him. I'd held the world too close and it had slipped from my arms.

I'm left with nothing but this strange beating in my heart that tells me I'm meant to do something in this world.

Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it's brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all.

more primal layers of creativity I yearn for, and at the same time, taking me down to an irreducible essence, all the way to the severity of my own dying. Down to the gnawed bone.

I began to glimpse the chasm that lay between the inclinations of my soul and my ability to carry them out. I had had a clear, pure moment of knowing that compelled me to risk my religion and move beyond patriarchy at church and within my spiritual life, but actually doing it? Now that was something else altogether...Yes, I was withering within these things. Internally I felt trapped.

There was something strangely beautiful about this, the coming together of two ways of life that I'd thought irreconcilable: duty and longing

stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I'd ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness.

and longing. We slipped into Mother's room while she was occupied in the courtyard and lifted

We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we?