Quotes About Wistfulness

Pryor reminded me of an emotional condition that is specific to Koreans: han, a combination of bitterness, wistfulness, shame, melancholy, and vengefulness, accumulated from years of brutal colonialism, war, and U.S.-supported dictatorships that have never been politically redressed. Han is so ongoing that it can even be passed down: to be Korean is to feel han.

A sharp moon was fighting with the flying rags and tatters of a storm, and Valentin regarded it with a wistfulness unusual in such scientific natures as his.

Folklore has a moral center to it. Folklore is always, always, always on the side of the underdog, and children have a natural instinct towards justice. They feel indignation at needless cruelty and wistfulness about acts of mercy and kindness.

It's very strange when the life you never had flashes before your eyes.

Reading by itself is certainly not sufficient to breed wistfulness; a natural-born peculiarity of wisdom ought to exist in one's very brain cells, and reflected on his very deep beliefs and thoughts..

when she was able to imagine a different life that might have been hers, the kind of life she knew that she'd always really wanted

I am always lonely for things I've never had and people I've never been.

Now is the autumn of our ennui.

We see on our death bed, not our whole life flashing before us – as with a drowning man – but an endless sequence of all the things we had wanted to do and had never done.

Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.

I would court you with a passion, if things were different. You'd never get me off your porch swing.

Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never have had it?

Ah me!" said he, "what might have been is not what is!

The older I get, the more I appreciate my childhood. It was paradise.

To heal my heart and drown my sorrows of yesterday. Was everything I could ever want… And nothing I could ever have.

Jeb: I wish I could explain what I'd give just to see you smile again. Max (thinking): How about your head on a stick?

How many times in your life are you allowed to say, "If only…?

Home was merely a dull ache in the back of his memory. A tiredness in his eyes.

And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness.

Of all sad words, of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been.' Let's add this thought, unto this verse: 'It might have been a great deal worse.

You and the quiet sky—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self, if one is always changing?

the kid was leaning against the window.

What might have been" is a pretty good definition of Hell.

I cried for what should have been.