Quotes About Yearning

The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.

Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too pow¬erful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos it¬self

But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have.

A lot of us are like that—I'm like that, Ed Abbey was like that, and it sounds like this McCandless kid was like that: We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.

Alaska ejerce una atracción magnética sobre los soñadores e inadaptados que creen que los enormes espacios inmaculados de la Última Frontera llenarán el vacío de su existencia.

The impetus for most fundamentalist movements—whether Mormon, Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Muslim, or Jewish—is a yearning to return to the mythical order and perfection of the original church.

VaroluÅŸun ham nabz?ndan koptuÄŸunu ac? içinde hissettiÄŸi yerden art?k uzakt?.

I'd say I'm living, but I'm not alive without you

Debemos optar por permanecer en el interior del paraíso del pasado el mayor tiempo posible o volver a nuestro anodino presente en el que, por lo general, las únicas cosas que anhelamos son el fin de semana, nuestro programa de televisión favorito, un sexo mediocre de vez en cuando, o ir a dormir por la noche?

What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.

Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

He felt like a helium balloon straining skyward on a slender string.

The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her.

He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance.

She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.

For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory. When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now.

Impossibility is attractive.

She, for her part, was accustomed to my leavings and didn't complain too much. But she still felt about me what she'd always felt, which was what I wouldn't really feel about her until after she was gone. I hate it when Daylight Savings Time starts while you're here, she told me while we were driving to the airport, because it means I have an hour less with you.

Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else's expense.

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

He goes from one sensation to another — but no satisfaction.

Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.

She was right for him, he was right for her, but they couldn't find a way to be together.

All of a sudden I became aware of how very hungry I was to construct and inhabit an imagined world.