Quotes About Longing

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)…

A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair. [Songs of Longing]

Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

They all have tired mouths and bright seamless souls. And a longing (as for sin) sometimes haunts their dreams. They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still, like many, many intervals in his might and melody. Only when they spread their wings are they wakers of a wind: as if God with his broad sculptor- hands leafed through the pages in the dark book of the beginning.

Because I never held you close, I hold you forever.

You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...

O shooting star that fell into my eyes and through my body-: not to forget you. To endure.

Long you must suffer, knowing not what, until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you. Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it.

And so I check myself and swallow the luring call of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and the sly animals see at once how little at home we are in the interpreted world. That leaves us some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten day after day; leaves us yesterday's street and the coddled loyalty of an old habit that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.

Suddenly I'm as if cast out, and this solitude surrounds me as something vast and unbounded, when my feeling, standing on the hills of my breasts, cries out for wings or for an end.

World was in the face of the beloved--, but suddenly it poured out and was gone: world is outside, world can not be grasped. Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it? Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank. But I was filled up also, with too much world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

That's when I want you— you knower of my emptiness, you unspeaking partner to my sorrow— that's when I need you, — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Ich bin derselbe noch, der kniete," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

So now my prayer is this: You, my own deep soul, trust me. I will not betray you. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Dann bete du, wie es dich dieser Iehrt," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

Das ist die Sehnsucht: wohnen im Gewoge und keine Heimat haben in der Zeit. Und das sind Wünsche: leise Dialoge täglicher Stunden mit der Ewigkeit.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe

Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.

To Lou: I want to see the world through you; for then I shall not be seeing the world but only you, you you! I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you. I have never heard you without thinking that I should like to believe in you. I have never longed for you without thinking that I should like to suffer for you. I have never desired you without thinking that I should be allowed to kneel before you.

No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it, but longing to degrade not even death; we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends, to feel its hands about us like a friend's.

Riding, riding, riding, through the dag, through the night, through the day. And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.

And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.