Quotes About Longing

Where did he take you?" she asked. She had wanted to ask this question for four years. It had taken that long for the words to come out. Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn't unknow.

thought if I ever fell in love, I would want my beloved to wish what I had come to wish, that the book had ended differently, so that the first Mrs. Rochester might have made her escape.

Shelby loves Maravelle; she wishes she could spend the night in Valley Stream, but being with Maravelle and her mother would only make her sadder. She doesn't have a mother anymore. There's no one to whom she's the most important person in the world.

Would you like to have a brother? By now Melek knew much of our language. I would like to have you, he told me. I laughed, but the laughter sounded sharp, like a rock against the both of us, or an arrow, one that could indeed pierce through flesh. I know I can't. So instead I'll have a brother.

Although my father had never been there, I came to believe I would someday see that city for him.

If she felt my gaze upon her, I assume she was accustomed to being stared at, just as I was used to wanting what I could not have.

Did you want something?" she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do as imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew.

Is it the man you want, or the feeling inside you when someone cares?

A secret is always hard, a stone wedged just beneath the skin. A constant reminder that won't go away, a secret invokes longing; it takes on a life of its own. In order to keep one well, certain things have to be done backward: Laughter instead of tears, a slow walk when the urge is to run. Always deny what is most important, at least in the presence of others.

Now whenever he kissed her, she cried and wished she had never fallen in love in the first place. It had made her too helpless, because that's what love did.

It was possible, Richard knew, to be away from home too long, to forget all the things you once knew by heart. He didn't want just his father, he wanted the boy he used to be, someone who could be comforted by the sound of his parents talking in the next room, someone who refused to come into the house for supper until after dusk because that was the hour when deer mysteriously appeared in the driveway.

Was this what love did? Make you so grateful for a word or two that you'd practically beg for such things to be said?

You don't forget the people you love," she told him. "That's what I've realized. They just get farther away. Like a spyglass turned around.

Quando você quer alguém, essa pessoa tem poder sobre você.

Doesn't everyone want what they cannot have?

This is the way it happens. You walk into a room with blue walls. You kiss a man in the garden. You feel your heart and bones and blood. You wait for him like a bird in a cage.

You may think it is one thing, when in fact it is something else entirely: infatuation, loneliness, seduction.

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.

She acted as though I were a stranger when I appeared. "Did you want something?" she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

I would watch his footprints when he went and mourn him before he was gone.

All I wanted was to be somebody else. Was that asking too much? Was that asking for everything?

That's all someone in the grip of obsession needs: the single possibility that desire might be real, a tiny shred of evidence to show you're not all alone in the dark.

want can be a hundred times stronger than need, and a thousand times stronger than common sense.