Quotes About Longing

was a spectacular and lonely landscape that I wished my father could see. I wished he could take off his shoes and climb over the rocks and wave to me and that he would be here in this world once again, if only for a few hours.

The strangest thing about her was the way she gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living.

When a man I like touches my arm or my hair, I want to know if he'll touch the center of me, and whatever I learned in school--I went to school for a long time--I seem to believe that my center can be reached best with the tip of a penis....

Like exiles, their delight was not in where they now found themselves but in whatever they could remember about the place, and the time, they had abandoned.

dull—she did not, with equal longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the edge of other, more interesting lives. She

There wasn't a tear to be seen on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them walked down to Schrafft's. Only him, again, leaning by the door, suit jacket and fedora, the sunlight striking gold, the leg he had favored bent back and pressed against the building. He was smoking a cigarette. He was the handsomest man on the block. He was waiting for her. She felt Pauline beside her

There wasn't a tear to be seen on the faces of the men and women in the street as the two of them walked down to Schrafft's. Only him, again, leaning by the door, suit jacket and fedora, the sunlight striking gold, the leg he had favored bent back and pressed against the building. He was smoking a cigarette. He was the handsomest man on the block. He was waiting for her.

But now as she watched her cousin's husband . . . , the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

Why not? Bread was what you wanted over the long haul, when you got right down to it. When you got right down to it, you wouldn't want a lifetime of cake.

There was the ache in his heart, and now over his shoulder and down his arm, as

Everyone who has been beaten as a child is susceptible to fear; everyone who was deprived of love as a child will long for it, sometimes their whole lives. This longing contains a whole bundle of expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the fear we have referred to, form an excellent medium in which the Fourth Commandment can thrive. It represents the power of adults over children, and it's reflected unmistakably in all the religions of the world.

The true source of her illness was the unfulfilled longing for communication, the deprivation of genuine contact with her parents and boyfriend. Her refusal to eat was the sign of this deficiency. Ultimately her recovery was possible because Anita realized that there were people who could and did understand her.

Marcel Proust was denied the chance to decipher the enigma of his life. I believe that the quest for "lost time" in the title of his great novel was the quest for the life he never lived. In

All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be.

What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle— And hoping It will reach Japan.

There ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for--but never did get to see.

She would lean her head against the back pillow of the sofa, thinking that she lay in his arms. You would not think that she'd remember his face but it would spring up in detail, the face of a creased and rather tired-looking, satirical, indoor sort of man. Nor was his body lacking, it was presented as reasonably worn but competent, and uniquely desirable.

The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather—a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.

Her hair had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and color, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft -- a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her.

She didn't really plan to travel there. She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.

She ached in expected and unexpected places.

How attractive, how delectable, the prospect of intimacy is, with the very person who will never grant it. I can still feel the pull of a man like that, of his promising and refusing. I would still like to know things. Never mind facts. Never mind theories, either.

I lived when I was young at the end of a long road, or a road that seemed long to me.