Quotes About Longing

All I knew was that I hated her. For I was like any dull ass who has ever loved someone who loved another. I thought: if only she were gone, it would change everything.

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

He wanted to go. He had always wanted to go, from the moment he was born into my arms.

I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me. If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.

The door closed, and the room swelled around me like a bruise. When she was here, I could pretend it felt small because of her, but when she left the four wood walls seemed to press towards me, like lungs that had breathed in.

Where there is greed, there is hope.

The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me.

and where there was greed there was hope.

I want-'' He stopped. Tore his fingers through his hair. ''Never mind what I want.'' His voice was quieter, now. ''What do you want?'' ''You.'' Always you.

I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.

The never ending ache of love and sorrow

I waited beside my son, but he scarcely knew it. His eyes had found the horizon, that seam of waves and sky.

I did not mind the emptiness either. For a thousand years I had tried to fill the space between myself and my family

I wanted to wake him and see those eyes open. A thousand thousand times I had seen it, but I never tired of it.

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like spring-water, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in the summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this.

Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.

I knew I was a fool. Even if he stayed past that spring to the next, such a man could never be happy closed up on my narrow shores.

The bed felt cold without him, and too large. I heard no sounds, and the stillness frightened me. It is like a tomb. I rose and rubbed my limbs, slapped them awake, trying to ward of a rising hysteria. This is what it will be, every day, without him. I felt a wild-eyed tightness in my chest, like a scream. Every day, without him.

I came for her, but there was no one who would come for me. The thought was steadying. After all, I had been alone my whole life.

The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to Troy and I would follow, even into death. Yes, I whispered. Yes.

There is this, too." His hand was ceaseless now. "I know I have told you of this." I closed my eyes. "Tell me again," I said.

He talked so often of longing for us and home. But it was lies. When he was back on Ithaca he was never content, always looking to the horizon. Once we were his again, he wanted something else.

The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.