Quotes About Longing

He had, indeed, one of the advantages which men who have lived and moved in society enjoy over those, however intelligent, who have not, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion which it inspires, but regard it as of no importance.

To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!

Our love becomes immense; we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though love had abruptly vanished at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to whose value we had not given enough thought before

I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would like to touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it;

Pode-se ter inclinação por uma pessoa. Mas para desencadear essa tristeza, esse sentimento do irreparável, essas angústias, que preparam o amor, é preciso - e talvez isso e não a pessoa amada seja o ansiado objeto da paixão - o risco de uma impossibilidade.

brž ko ljubiš, nimaš nikogar ve? rad

But life, gradually revealing to me the permanence of our needs, had taught me that if a person is unobtainable we have to settle for someone else, and I felt that what I had asked of Albertine could have been supplied by another, like Mlle de Stermaria.

No doubt I had long been prepared, by virtue of the sway exercised over my imagination and my ability to be moved by the example of Swann, to believe that what I feared was true, instead of what I would have wished for. Thus the comfort brought by Albertine's affirmations was all but compromised for a moment because I recalled the story of Odette.

We had better stop seeing each other, life is forcing us apart." No doubt when I was writing those words to Gilberte, I was saying to myself that when I next loved, not her but some other person, the excess of my love would diminish the love that that person might otherwise feel for me, as if between two people there were inevitably a fixed amount of love, so that where one loved more the other must love less, and from that other, as from Gilberte, I should be forced one day to separate.

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?

we love only that in which we pursue something inaccessible, we love only what we do not possess,

and though I was obliged to see her magnificent hat, at least I managed to banish from her face the signs of a joy that I ought to have been happy to share with her, but which, as so often happens while those whom we love best are still alive, can strike us as a mere irritant, a mark of something silly and small-minded, rather than the precious revelation of the happiness we long to give to them.

These are the creatures we usually fall in love with, only to suffer the more. For each new anxiety they cause us blots out from our eyes a part of their personality. We were resigned to suffering, thinking we loved something outside ourselves, and we come to realize that our love is a function of our sadness, that perhaps it is our sadness, and that its object is only to a small extent the young girl with raven hair.

C'est toujours l'attachement à l'objet qui entraine la mort du possesseur

was nevertheless still young, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her. The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish which all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk – which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person – of an impossibility.

O olhar de Robert, com efeito, parecia por momentos atingir uma profundidade que abandonava em seguida, como um mergulhador que tocou o fundo. Esse fundo, que tanto mal fazia a Robert quando o tocava que ele o deixava imediatamente para voltar um instante depois, era a lembrança de que havia rompido com a sua amante.

And the more completely our desires have been realized and the longer the happiness has been prolonged, against the laws of nature, and has been consecrated by habit, the stronger the sorrow, the more impossible to bear. In another sense too, the two tendencies, in this case the one which made me want my letter to be sent and, when I thought that it had been, to regret this, are both true in their way.

Tuo metu aš buvau ?simyl?j?s teatr?, žinoma, platoniška meile, nes t?vai dar niekad nebuvo leid? man tenai nueiti, ir tok? menk? tetur?jau supratim?, kas tai per malonumas, kad bemaž tik?jau, jog teatre kiekvienas ži?ri tartum pro stereoskop? ? dekoracijas, rodomas jam vienam, nors ir visai panašias ? t?kstan?ius kit?, kurias mato visi ži?rovai, tiktai kiekvienas atskirai.

My darling, dear Marcel, I return less quickly than this cyclist, whose machine I would like to borrow in order to be with you sooner. How could you imagine that I might be angry or that I could enjoy anything better than to be with you? It will be nice to go out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer still if we never went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine.

With women who do not love Us, as with the 'missing,' the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent our continuing to wait for news. We live on tenterhooks, starting at the slightest sound

The only true paradise is a paradise lost

he asked himself whether this period, upon which he had entered, was to last much longer, whether presently his mind's eye would cease to behold that dear countenance, save as occupying a distant and diminished position, and on the verge of ceasing to shed on him the radiance of its charm.

Con le donne che non ci amano, come con i "dispersi", sapere di non avere più nulla da sperare non ci impedisce di continuare ad attendere.