Quotes About Longing

The other day someone I know posted a quote from the poet Mary Oliver, "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" And I almost began to cry. I kept thinking of how scared I've been, how scared many of us have been during these years of the pandemic. And of course, it's not just the pandemic, so many overwhelming fears. I read that quote and I suddenly longed for breath. For relief. For the end of fear.

Perhaps we are hurtling our bodies towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time...

Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body's wants,

I trust him. He leans in, tells me the real miracle, more than marriage, the thing that makes you believe there might be a god after all, is the making of a child. He stares at me, but I am not there anymore. I don't say we've tried a long time, been sad, been happy, that perhaps the only thing I can make is love and art. I want to tell him that's enough. Isn't it?

making music like resurrection or haunting or just plain need.

the one who wants to love you, but often isn't good at even that, the one who doesn't want to be diminished by how much she wants to be yours.

Hugo thought that it simply could not be otherwise; he would surely somewhere see that beautiful, beloved face that he had daily seen for so long!    But he did not see it.    After his search had gone on for some months, after winter had already cast its snowflakes and its blanket of ice over the city, he gave up his efforts. He sat in his room and held his lovely, weary head in both his hands.

even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We're not individuals. We're haunted by the living as well as the dead.

how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control. A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.

Against the monster, I've always wanted meaning. Not for its own sake, because in the usual course of things, who needs the self-consciousness of it? Let meaning be immanent, noted in passing, if at all. But that won't do when the monster has its funnel driven into the back of your head and is sucking the light coming through your eyes straight out of you into the mouth of oblivion. So like a cripple I long for what others don't notice they have: ordinary meaning.

This feeling of being in proximity to something that's lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now.

The longer the night, the shorter the morning

He took a pull of beer and tried to think of one thing that North Korea could give him that would make his life better.

Jun Do remembered that he had no one that mattered to him, which was why his tattoo would be of an actress he'd never seen, taken from a calendar at the helm of a fishing boat.

They're about a woman whose beauty is like a rare flower. There is a man who has a great love for her, a love he's been saving up for his entire life, and it doesn't matter that he must make a great journey to her, and it doesn't matter if their time together is brief, that afterward he might lose her, for she is the flower of his heart and nothing will keep him from her.

Wstrzymuj?c oddech, usty chwyta? jej westchnienie. I okiem ?owi? wszystkie jej wzroku promienie.

?y?am na ?wiecie; lecz, ach! nie dla ?wiata! My?l moja, nazbyt skrzydlata, Nigdy na ziemskiej nie spocz??a b?oni.

Kas nežino meil?s, tas tikrai laimingas Nekankins to naktys, dienos ilgesingos.

Wgryz? si? jak piekielny dym pod jej powieki I w g?owie utkwi? na wieki. B?d? jej my?li czyste przez ca?y dzie? brudzi? I w nocy j? ze snu budzi?.

Waleryjo! Ty przecie? spomi?dzy ziemianek Zazdro?ci godna! Ciebie ubóstwia? kochanek, O którym inna pró?no ca?e ?ycie marzy, Którego rysów szuka w ka?dej nowej twarzy, I w ka?dym nowym g?osie nadaremnie bada Tonu, który jej duszy brzmieniem odpowiada.

wanting is what we do to survive, and we want only what isn't there

All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn't know you had (of one's formative frustrations, and of one's attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction.

However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.

Sometimes, my darling Caroline, when I can't take the want any longer; I go and look at you. Did you know that? I stand by your bedside and watch you sleeping by moonlight, your angelic face draped in shadows, so lovely, so peaceful, and I wonder if you're dreaming about me.