Quotes About Longing

I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother's teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that.

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

After a while there were no more tule fogs at dawn and all Charlotte wanted was one night that did not end badly.

I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.

I can now afford to think about her. I no longer cry when I hear her name. I no longer imagine the transporter being called to take her to the morgue after we left the ICU. Yet I still need her with me.

I've never been any place I wanted to go.

What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that small thing be? If I had said it in time would it have worked?

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty," Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. "But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

I wanted to say that you don't grieve in the same way for love you've never had, but it still feels like a punch in the stomach. I wanted to say that you don't get any sympathy cards for the love you've never had, however much it hurts.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have know have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places that I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where to cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.

It's all gone with you, he said. It used to be there but it's gone. Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

I could picture him gray and gaunt, looking out from an armchair, braving the worst. I knew how he'd be; I knew him. He'd be glad to see me by then, more than glad. I could feel myself wishing it were that time now.

It was one of the mysteries of modern life, what happened to old love.

Beneath her Marks and Spencer jersey, her heart sometimes called him darling, and after two glasses of Liebfraumilch, lover.

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine… I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb

More. Oh that word. That deceptive word. That eater of lives; that malcontent.

At such times I feel I could die for love of her, my little stranger, my heart swelling dangerously so that the only release is to run too, my red coat flapping around my shoulders like wings, my hair a comet's tail in the patchy blue sky.

Sometimes, being told not to do something just makes us want it all the more. Sometimes, a little of what you crave is better than total abstinence.

Come to me in love, Love. Come to me in love.

And if I never have a veil, or a golden ring on my hand, I will still have you, my love, and that will be enough for me. Sleep well, love, and dream of me. And know that, if I were to live for a thousand years, there would still not be enough nights in which to dream of you.