Quotes About Yearning

If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love? From Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, 1962

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. --from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

I used to pray to recover you. --from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.

I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet. --from Lesbos, written 18 October 1962

O love, how did you get here? --from Nick and the Candlestick, written 29 October 1962

I hurl my heart to halt his pace. --from Pursuit, written 1956

I wait and ache.

I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem Mad Girl's Love Song

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence. -

Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain: A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --

to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.