Quotes About Yearning

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

She never wanted the truth . . . She wanted you . She would have taken from you what you could give her, and been glad of it even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet—since it was all for tenderness—she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man—that she loves you with passion.

What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live? Something—and this reached him with a pang—that he, John Marcher, hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's arid end.  No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?... The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. 

He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated.

I adore a moat,' said Isabel. 'Good-bye.

I'm capable of nothing with regard to you . . . but just of being infernally in love with you.

Now that he was alone with her all the passion he had never stifled surged into his senses; it hummed in his eyes and made things swim round him.

When I tell you I love you it's simply what I came for. I thought it was for something else; but it was for that. I shouldn't say it if I didn't believe I should never see you again. It's the last time — let me pluck a single flower! I've no right to say that, I know; and you've no right to listen. But you don't listen; you never listen, you're always thinking of something else.

His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.

You did something once — you know it. O Ralph, you've been everything! What have I done for you — what can I do to-day? I would die if you could live. But I don't wish you to live; I would die myself, not to lose you. Her voice was as broken as his own and full of tears and anguish. You won't lose me — you'll keep me. Keep me in your heart; I shall be nearer to you than I've ever been.

I shall always think of you; I shall never think of anyone else. I came to England simply because you are here; I couldn't stay at home after you had gone: I hated the country because you were not in it. If I like this country at present it is only because it holds you.

His long looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make them most completely her possession.

She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs.

I cling to some saving romance in things.

I love you as I've never loved you.

Your desire is to escape everything? Everything.

She longed for opportunities, but these were not the opportunities she meant.

Oh dear, I'm quite alone, I've nothing on earth to do.

She liked him — she had liked him all the while; now anything might happen! She was ready — she had been ready always, waiting for him to speak. If he had not spoken she would have waited for ever; but when the word came she dropped like the peach from the shaken tree.

Ah, I must see Ralph! Isabel wailed; not in resentment, not in the quick passion her companion had looked for; but in a tone of far-reaching, infinite sadness.

Do you know I sometimes think that I'm a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.

There isn't a thing I can imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it backward for its sweet simplicity.

Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure or even to understand.

She was the blessing that had now become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he had lost himself?