Quotes About Yearning

That's the trouble with loving a wild thing: You're always left watching the door. But you also get kind of used to it.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

I can't love you unless I give you up.

He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.

Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.

Isn't it natural that I should belittle all the things I can't offer you?

It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.

She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough; it could not buy more than a few moments...

She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.

Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. The House of Mirth

She was something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.

She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain.

She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted; and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the experiences of her more privileged friends.

Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman. She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.

The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

Every drop of blood in Lily's veins invited her to happiness.

What's the use—when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.

There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.