Quotes About Longing

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

Wherever it left us, we were barely learning to live with it when here came Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams to tell us that no one has ever been loved the way everybody wants to be loved, and that's hard. That's hard. --last stanza of How Step by Step We Have Come to Understand

Time goes too fast. Come home.

Vampire fans read the vampire not as death but as possibility

Nostalgia is longing for a place you'd never move back to.

No lugar desconhecido habita o desejo.

It was not Hansu that she missed, or even Isak. What she was seeing again in her dreams was her youth, her beginning, and her wishes--so this is how she became a woman.

She has loved him, and she could not bear the thought of him being gone form this life.

For people like us, home doesn't exist.

It wasn't uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort--the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn't work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment. Sins couldn't be laundered by good results.

When she was there, she had not loved it enough.

Her complaint about her husband was not that he was boring or that he wasn't home enough. Nori was not a bad person. It was just that she felt like she had no clear sense of him after nineteen years of marriage, and she doubted that she ever would.

he walked home alone, deep in thoughts of her, and he knew that he wanted to be with her, even if it would not be easy.

More than anything, she was afraid of running into him. Yet it would be worse, she thought, never to see him at all.

The stupid heart could not help but hope.

It wasn't uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort—the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn't work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment

It did not occur to her to argue with these kinds of well-wishes that she would've given up nearly everything if her mother could have been alive. No one wanted to see how she might be missing something, too-that if Ella were to run away, she had no mother who'd search for her.