Quotes About Longing

When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love." from "Memoriam

I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.

You've tormented my dreams and tortured my days. I hear your voice in other women's voices. The scent of your hair teases my senses…a memory I can't expunge. You haunt me, coming between me and my work and my pleasures, and so I'm going to exorcise you. I'm going to take you, to satiate myself with you until I no longer want you. Since you won't come to me freely, you'll come to me under duress, but come to me you will.

The mountains are so beautiful they make me ache inside because the moment I look away I know I shall need to see them again. And I cannot spend the rest of my life standing on the spot staring at shifting sunlight and mist and shadows across the sea.

Words? I tell you not to write me letters; I command you. Is it not enough to want you so in vain, but you send me what evokes you here before me -- this paper, all along whose lines your hand has lain?

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I'd envision his face.

Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.

She reminded Kevin again that she had forced herself to turn and walk away from him when everything in her wanted to stay.

Leaving the page of the book carelessly open,something unsaid, the phone off the hookand the love, whatever it was, an infection.

But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

I should be working and not writing you. But this is a missing you, where are you, hello and necessary for my soul.

Need is not quite belief.

I never seemed to like the spring for what it was; I always loved it for what it might have been. In the head. In the heart of hearts. It is in my ability, I think, to love something fully only if I am naturally, compulsively, irrationally drawn to it.

I didn't feel at home in life.

And there you are. And I liked you a lot today. A lot. And I want to talk to you. Selfishly.

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

I need someone, aside from pain, to rock me out, away, alone.

I love you. I wish we were real. — Anne Sexton, from a letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, 28 March 1963, A Self-Portrait in Letters, eds. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.

I ate you up. All my need took you down like a meal.

Because we need. Because we are sore creatures.

Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.