Quotes About Longing

Caro's eyes slid longingly over the display, the pralines, truffles, amandines, and nougats, the éclairs, florentines, liqueur cherries, frosted almonds.

I dreamt that I was old. And you – you were beside me. Forever young – in your hand, a cup of stars.

With a jolt of surprise, he realized he had not really wanted anything for twenty years.

Oh, muerte cruel! ¿Por qué vienes a quien no te quiere y rehuyes a los que te desean?

She did not believe he could have really gone, because for her, to leave the person you loved was impossible.

There was no twinkle in his eyes. Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough. Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn't understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn't work that way.

If you have reasons for not coming back, I don't want to know them. I just want you to come back anyway. Ignorance, see?

Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable

I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.

But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

What we all want, really, is to be loved. That craving drives our worst behavior.

What was wrong with me? I had a decent life. I was healthy. I wasn't starving or maimed by a land mine or orphaned. Yet somehow, it wasn't enough. I had a hole in me, and everything I took for granted slipped through it like sand. I felt like I had swallowed yeast, like whatever evil was festering inside me had doubled in size.

I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.

When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he'll crave you in the same way you crave him.

Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.

He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.

love doesn't follow the rules... nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable.

I don't know. But I do know that I'm at the stage of my life where I want forever , not right now . I know that the first person I kissed won't be nearly as important as the last person I kiss. And I also know better than to dream about things that can't happen.

It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.

You can miss a person you've never known.

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.