Quotes About Longing

Waiting for the Revolution can be as agonizing and intoxicating as waiting for one's lover.

My parents sleep like children in the dark I am too far to hear them breathe

How do I think of you? As someone I want to be with. As someone as young as me, but older, if that makes sense. As someone I like to look at, not just because you're good to look at, but because just looking at you makes me smile and feel happier. As someone who knows her mind and who I envy for that. As someone who is strong in herself without seeming to need anyone else to help her. As someone who makes me thinks and unsettles me in a way that makes me feel more alive.

but the rest of the evening is nothing but the trembling edges of something I am so tired of feeling and I do not want to feel anymore.

when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.

The afternoons were getting longer again, stretching. I stayed too long at a stoplight because the sunlight was so pretty, sifting through all the leaves on the sycamore trees lining Sierra Bonita, turning each a pale jade green. The jacaranda trees preparing for their burst of true lavender blue come May. Go, said Dad. Sorry, I said.

In those days, she let her hair loose, down to her waist, and whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people wanted to shield.

I wanted to marry wood. I wanted to chew down some two–by–fours, crawl inside a tree, slide elm into my aorta so that every beat of every second was a grand waltz with luck.

Wherever the mind has a lot of attachment, we will experience intense suffering, intense grief, intense difficulty right there. The place we experience the most problems is the place we have the most attraction, longing and concern. Please try to resolve this. Now, while you still have life and breath, keep on looking at it and reading it until you are able to 'translate' it and solve the problem.

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt.

Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.

Even if our loved ones have assured us that they'll be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special.

What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly 'whole'.

The longing provoked by the brochure was an example , at once touching and pathetic, of how projects (and even whole lives) might be influenced by the simplest and most unexamined images of happiness; of how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set in motion by nothing more than the sigh of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze. I resolved to travel to the island of Barbados.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money.

For most of our lives, sex seems fated to remain steeped in longing and awkwardness. Whatever the manuals may promise, there are really no solutions to the majority of the dilemmas sex creates for us.