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Quotes About Searching

Maintenant je me cherche et ne me trouve plus.
~ Jean Racine
I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn't really care.
~ Jean Rhys
Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.
~ Jean Valentine
What I miss most since computers is the existence of rough drafts. […]. I miss the mistakes, the words scribbled in the margin, the chaos, the arrows pointing all over the place – all those signs of movement, of life, of unresolved searching.
~ Jean-Claude Carrière
Tommy was nowhere in sight, and though she waited for a few minutes, he didn't reappear.
~ Jeanne Birdsall
I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I find it's almost impossible to put two words together and not find at least some meaning. We're conditioned to look for patterns and identify mysteries to solve much more than we are designed to dictate what we're searching for. I recommend allowing that natural curiosity and our sense-making brains to do their thing.
~ Jeff Tweedy
Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline. Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
I'm not sure anybody out there really knows what they're doing. Apparently not
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
But nothing advanced into the realm of what you might call true love. Maybe I just wasn't looking for it. Or maybe I was being spared from it. Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I've always witnessed.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
Your job, then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
Hadn't I wanted this? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life. So why didn't I see myself in any of it? The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't wanna hurt anybody, I wanted to slip quietly out the back door and not stop running until I reached Greenland. Instead I made a decision: to pray.. you know...like... to God. And it was such a foreign concept to me that I swear I almost began with: I'm a big fan of your work.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
He thought he saw her smile waver when she read it, then she was hugging him tightly. "You're the one who needs to take care of yourself. Your escape is still all the news. They'll be searching for you." She drew back to look at him, and to his consternation he saw that she had tears in her eyes. "I couldn't bear to lose you again." He bent and kissed her forehead. Even if he could speak there was nothing he could say to comfort her.
~ Elizabeth Hoyt
I believe that you wanted to love Marie—that you're enamored by the idea of love—but that you have no concept what love is. I think that's what you're searching for in St. Giles—some source of emotion, some inkling of what human feeling really is.
~ Elizabeth Hoyt
The account of the face treatment that Catherine had undergone at the hands of a quack was taken from a description given to Elizabeth by Katherine Mansfield, her New Zealand cousin, of her own experience in Paris when she was searching for a cure for consumption. This may have been too tragic a source. If Elizabeth needed copy she had, if Frere is to be believed, her own experience to draw on.
~ Elizabeth von Arnim
I've been looking for a feeling like that everywhere I go. I've been waiting for someone to see all the good in me at every truck stop and intersection along the way. I've been waiting all my life for the moment to arrive when I can just stop. Stop looking
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
But in the end, after the curtain dropped over these little dramas, they all seemed able to go back to their rooms and back to their lives, they all seemed to know that it was just a game, that it scuffed you up and wore you out a little, but that you would get on with it. Only I seemed to be left behind, crying and screaming about wanting more, wanting my money back, wanting some satisfaction, wanting to feel something. I was the only person going to a prostitute in search of true love.
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
You entered this hall in your moonlit unconsciousness pleading for a different life.
~ Alice Notley
I wanted something different—Or is this it?
~ Alice Notley
I am someone who couldn't find her place
~ Alice Notley
And, as usual, you don't really know what you want.
~ Alice Notley
I thought I heard myself being looked for what is it I said what is it madam that you wish to imply
~ Alice Oswald
just so abrupt and odd the way she went hungrily asking in the heart's thick accent
~ Alice Oswald
They are caught between one world and another, and they no longer belong anywhere.
~ Alison Croggon