Quotes About Longing

love can die from being withheld, like a flower that is so beautiful you hide it away from the sun trying to make it last longer;

is it too much to ask for a little romance?

I glanced back at the door; I don't know why. Jean-Claude stood utterly still, no sense of anything, as if he were not there at all. Then he moved, one pale hand raised to his lips. He blew me a kiss across the room. The night's entertainment had begun.

Our distance has lived in me like the aftermath of a bad dream-I carry it around, the knowledge that we were once close, that something was lost; it's the lingering sadness of unfinished business. (18)

So why get upset over him leaving when he said he was going to all along? It was quite simple, so simple that Emmy suspected every woman on the planet instinctively understood the concept even when no man was able to wrap his brain around it: She didn't necessarily want him to stay, she just wanted him to want to stay.

I think I'll always love him.

myself in love with her,' he repeated

It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....

O how I envied him his feelings!

I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive. (Explaining her attraction to Moby-Dick)

Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.

Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.

We domestic sensualists live in a state of longing, no matter how comfortable our own places are.

What do you miss about being alive? The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles - p. 272.

I'm angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating icecream or kissing a boy or maybe a girl...

I wanted a coffin made of wood from trees not yet planted my appetite for time was growing.

the mouth they want to eat with, smile with, sing with, paint with glitter, lip- stick, and stain with grape popsicles or wine from a dark sea, a mouth to whisper with love, to open wide and swallow what love offers, hungry always for more.

I thought of all the ancestors waiting at the water's edge for their stolen children to come home. Waiting and waiting and waiting . . .

They were coming, on wings from far away, all the pictures and voices, smells, tastes, all the everything from the past was flying toward me as fast as it could.

For the first time I was learning how much easier it was to leave than to stay behind and love.

I'm clutching my favorite record, More of the Monkees. I listened to that album incessantly, thinking that Davy Jones might "forget that girl" and find the kindergarten siren of his dreams. I look like a five-year-old mod with dark circles under her eyes.

When we arrived at his cottage we had known each other forever.

It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn't scratch it.

I haven't seen her in five years. Well, hell, I haven't had a cigarette in twelve, and I damn well wanted one for a minute there. Sometimes I don't think anybody ever gets over anything.