Quotes About Longing

Some say that over time homesickness loses its specific content, that it starts to smolder and only then becomes all-consuming, because it's no longer focused on a concrete home.

Hunger is not an object.

Hunger is an object.

Se, nesta vida, me quisessem de novo deportar, uma coisa eu saberia: há coisas primeiras que já querem as segundas, mesmo contra o nosso querer. O que é que me compele a manter estas ligações. Porque quero eu, à noite, ter direito à minha miséria. Porque é que não consigo ser livre. Porque obrigo o campo de trabalho a obedecer-me. Saudades de casa. Como se eu precisasse.

Except you're not allowed to talk about hunger when you're hungry. Hunger is not a bunk or a bed frame, otherwise it could be measured. Hunger is not an object.

She felt tears dripping down her cheeks, and she wondered if anyone would ever miss her if she simply sat here, drinking coffee for days and days, years and years.

For no one, in our long decline, So dusty, spiteful and divided, Had quite such pleasant friends as mine, Or loved them half as much as I did.

Everybody wants something, if only for the pain to stop.

When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again

Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be.

He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.

I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.

But we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain.

Once Henry says, 'This is my wish,' it becomes so dear and familiar a wish that he thinks he has always had it. He names his need, and he wants it supplied.

Far away can be too far away, when the wrong people are left behind.

O, give me burning blueand brittle burnt sea-weedabove the tide-line,as I stand, still unsatisfied,under the long shadow-on-snow of the pine.

I tasted, sensed, wanted beauty.

Like billowing clouds, Like the incessant gurgle of the brook, The longing of the spirit can never be stilled.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear." From the book An Experiment in Love.

I didn't want to die, ever. I wanted to watch a million suns set, love a million women, walk down a million city streets and lonely roads. A thousand lifetimes wouldn't be enough for that. Sometimes, convinced I had come down with some fatal illness, I was afraid I wouldn't even have one.

longing to trust someone; I was making life a fiction, or writing

For so long, I've only had one-sided feelings for other people. I've completely forgotten how good it feels to be loved.

There's nothing worse than not knowing how the one you love feels about you. Of course, in a way, it's not knowing that makes love so exciting...

I had always regarded Manhattan the way an orphan might think of the mother who had laid him on the doorstep of a mosque: it meant nothing to me but also everything.