Quotes About Longing

And Chris remembers: what they used to talk about was desire. Impossible, longing dreams. Delirious, aching confusion. That was the vital element they lived off … because it was the one thing that mattered. Not things, or achievements, or politics, or fracking or anything else: just sweet naked blameless unending desire.

You get exactly what you want, Anatole's always suspected, only when you get it it's no longer what you want, you need something else.

Having without having: it's possible, isn't it, that that's worse than not having at all?

There's always people looking the other way when the miracles take place, people who want only a good night's sleep when the stars are dancing, comets falling, the angels leaning low out of midnight with their trumpets, their cantatas of longing.

There was no denying it. Boys grabbed him. Their loveliness tore him apart. The world was a wonder after all.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want.

An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in.

We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross

Oh, hasten not this loving act, Rapture where self and not-self meet: My life has been the awaiting you, Your footfall was my own heart's beat.

to live means to lack something at every moment

Car j'ai vécu de vous attendre, Et mon coeur n'était que vos pas.

Ne hâte pas cet acte tendre, Douceur d'être et de n'être pas, Car j'ai vécu de vous attendre, Et mon coeur n'était que vos pas.

it is only when you don't care that you don't desire

The long sobsOf the violinsOf autumnPierce my heartWith monotonous languor.

Does your heart still throb at my very name? Do you still see my soul in your dreams? from "Sentimental Dialogue

Ariette III Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville ; Quelle est cette langueur Qui pénètre mon coeur ? Ô bruit doux de la pluie Par terre et sur les toits ! Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie, Ô le chant de la pluie ! Il pleure sans raison Dans ce coeur qui s'écoeure. Quoi ! nulle trahison ? Ce deuil est sans raison. C'est bien la pire peine De ne savoir pourquoi Sans amour et sans haine Mon coeur a tant de peine !

Ton cÅ"ur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom ? - Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve ? - Non.

Why do we only miss what we can't have when we can't have it, but do nothing to keep it when we can?

She wanted Mark to come back and to smell him and feel him and she wanted to tell him that they still beg for it from her, they still want her and what do you think about that Mark? I'm yours and I'm the slut of all sluts. She wanted to say, Markie you haven't taken it away from me I still have it. I still have what it takes. She thought, I could show you my insides, I could turn myself inside out for you, me, me, who everybody wants, me, who can swallow the whole world.

There was a siege going on: it had been going on for a long time, but the besieged themselves were the last to take it seriously.

Knowing he was suffering pained me. That's the way love tangles you up. I couldn't stop loving him, and couldn't shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him— but I also didn't have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.

This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.

I'd like it if you could love me for a little while at least.