Quotes About Longing

You don't want him for a reason. You want him because he's your father.

Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.

She sat icy and withdrawn. She had hoped he would touch her, put his arms around her. Now she felt she would kill him if he tried.

She was still vaguely hopeful that there was love out there somewhere—just a little less sure that she might actually find it.

You know how sorry he is Nan. You must know how he'd give any of us the moon after he's been—not himself." "It's too high a price to pay for the moon

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.' All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.

Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. 239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

I find,' he says, his voice still muffled, 'that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can't have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That's what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

All my life I dreamed of having someone think I was beautiful.

If only. The saddest two words in any language.

He kissed her then, not gently, not tenderly. He didn't kiss her to comfort her. He took her mouth hungrily, almost savagely, wanting to punish her for having a body that tormented him, for telling him that his last kiss had meant nothing, needed to punish her for letting scum like Jack Caldwell call her honey, and for ever thinking about a man who wasn't him.

ll we want is to succumb to a single kiss that will contain us like a marathon with no finish line, and if so, that we land like newspapers before sunrise, halcyon mornings arrived like blue martinis. I am learning the steps to a foreign song: her mind was torpedo, and her body was storm, a kind of Wow. All we want is a metropolis of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding and park benches? She says, Leave it all up to me.

Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.

My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.

Remember Oaxaca? The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert.

Yet they had loved one another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild beasts, calling for help—dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace: Oaxaca.

the whip-poor-will, like love and wisdom, had no home

Oaxaca... The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert.

No amount of success - whatever that means, quote-unquote success - no amount of success replaces the reality of being separated from my family for this long.

There was a monster in me that had to be fed by success. There is a monster in us all that has to be fed by something.

Every desire has it's own demand and a price to pay.