Quotes About Yearning

Some friends accused me of whoring after the Infinite. Well, what better whoredom is there?

We are limited in joy, knowledge, and being, the three things people really want.

I brought my face up and put my head back, baring my neck to the wind like a lover, to the rain like an offering.

our long-lost paradise with all the aching, poison-sweet memories it holds

Because every desire has its proper object. It means people spend their lives wanting things they shouldn't. The world confuses into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn't belong.

He looked up. She was standing a few feet away from him. He noticed that she was wearing a black beret at a rakish angle and that she looked exciting and mysterious like someone you see driving by abroad, alone in an open car, someone unattainable and more desirable than anyone you have ever known. Someone who is on her way to make love to somebody else. Someone who is not for you.

Some love is fire, some love is rust. But the finest, cleanest love is lust.

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for a something, version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favourite shoes.

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.

But soon I loved her completely and wished to possess her, own her, absorb her, eat her. I wanted her in my arms and in my bed, I longed she would open her legs to me

On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back.

Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal.

since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.

She was not in love, or out of love -- she felt nothing. She just wanted to be here alone in the dusk against the bulk of her giant tree.

When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh.

He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile.

A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again.

She would have called after him but for the dread of being ignored.

At last he could admit to himself that he had never met anyone he loved as much, that he had never found anyone, man or woman, who matched her seriousness.

W]ieder stieg ein unbestimmtes Gefühl von Frustration und Sehnsucht in mir auf bei dem Gedanken, dass ich das falsche Leben führte.

Anyone watching me might have thought I was consulting a reference book, I turned the pages so fast. And I suppose I was, in my mindless way, looking for something, a version of myself, a heroine I could slip inside as one might a pair of favorite shoes... For it was my best self I wanted ...