Quotes About Longing

Lincoln's heartbeat picked up a little, the way it always did when he rounded that last bend in the road and saw home waiting up ahead. Home.

I could never be sure whether he would be there when I arrived. On my way through the forest I used to pass a large granite block where I would stop, draw my breath and close my fists with my thumbs inside, then close my eyes and whisper: 'Please, please, please let him be there today,' before continuing. If he wasn't, I felt it was because I had done wrong. That somehow I had to earn the right to such pleasure.

What We Want What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.

I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. [from "After an Absence"]

I'm only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I'll be gone forever—- the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I'd need for an eternity of traveling light. I've left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and heating dinner. But like the weather front they warn is on its way with its switchblades of wind and ice, our lives have minds of their own.

I need someone real, who will be right for me now, here, and soon. Until then I'm lost. I think I am mad at times." Because

She was a child robbed of her beloved sea and shore

I miss you every time that we say goodbye, even though I know I will see you the next day. I miss you when you are across the room, and I can see you. I miss you when you sit beside me and I cannot touch you.

There is a strange feeling of longing that I have always had, always a desire to be someplace better than where I am. But the world I want to enter is always disappearing before I get there.

You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart.

Her deepest longing, perhaps, was to be loved unconditionally, and at the same time be left in peace. But she never told anyone. It is shameful and egotistical to hope for unconditional love and at the same time want to be left in peace. The mother's inner worlds were neatly sealed—dark, gilded worlds.

Her deepest longing, perhaps, was to be loved unconditionally, and at the same time be left in peace. But she never told anyone. It is shameful and egotistical to hope for unconditional love and at the same time want to be left in peace.

We chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

It was not living, it was vegetation. We longed for death.

Come! our world is done: For all the witchery of the world is fled, And lost all wanton wisdom long since won.

In my dreams I've kissed your lips a thousand times.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

So when I said I'd miss him, I meant I would miss what we had not experienced, and I don't know what that's called: nostalgia for what didn't happen.

Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you'd think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it.

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

Incredibly, the self-starved never appear capable of taking any pleasure in the very vessel for which they've sacrificed.

I wondered if that wasn't the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn't that eating was so great-it wasn't-but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay.

Se supone que los hombres piensan en el sexo todo el tiempo, pero él ya no lo hacía, y ahora lo recordaba con tanta fuerza que dolía.