Quotes About Yearning

But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.

And how heartbreaking, because if it were all just a few degrees different, she is pretty sure they could be quite happy together.

I wonder if they are the only three in the world: the man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without ever becoming yours.

If this was all I ever got, it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me, and if this was all I ever got, I'd never stop wanting more of it.

To be with him in this way was an almost intolerable ecstasy.

suppressed kind. What I wanted to know (it was useless, and adolescent as well)

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will -- that is the part that's almost unbearable.

As we enter the path of transformation, the most valuable thing we have working in our favor is our yearning.

The former Mary Loveday was a thin woman in whose face any youthful beauty she may have possessed had been extinguished by years and unhappiness. There were unbecoming shadows around her eyes, two lines of discontent drew down her mouth corners, and her skin had the dry and unnourished look of a woman without a lover. Her

He was studying his grandmother, as if he was hungry too, but for something not food, hungry in a way that food could never fill.

He was wrong, somehow, and he wanted to be all right, but it was almost as if there was some secret nobody would tell him, so he was always going to be stuck outside.

there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.

All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.

He would come back. She held the keys to his soul. But meanwhile, how he would torture her with his battle against her. She shrank from it.

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

Aren't I enough for you?' she asked. 'No,' he said. 'You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.' (Women in Love)

There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.

Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them? Why don't you have a bit more restraint, or reserve, or something? She looked up at him full of pain, then continued slowly to stroke her lips against a ruffled flower. Their scent, as she smelled it, was so much kinder than he; it almost made her cry.

The human soul needs beauty more than bread.

All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.

But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to? It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.

You're always begging things to love you, he said, as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

That's how women are with me said Paul. They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me.