Quotes About Longing

I wanted her body and soul, but body first.

any attachment bears within it the tragedy of loss.

I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire.

When you're my age, Tom, you live in the Past a great deal. You remember it; you dream of it.

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

Why me? He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

Always we desire too much or not enough and we compensate accordingly.

Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash.

Finally, slowly, I raise my head and lean back on my elbows and take in the sight of him. I'm struck by his voracity. He's like a ravenous child who has just been given food and prefers to choke on it. I'm not sure where this need for another man's sex comes from but I sense that on the other side of all the repression and self-censoring there exists an equally powerful fever.

Because you will leave and we will stay.

Je voulais juste t'écrire que j'ai été heureux pendant ces mois que nous avons passés ensemble, que je n'ai jamais été aussi heureux, et que je sais déjà que je ne serai plus jamais aussi heureux.

C'était de l'amour évidemment. Et demain, ça sera un grand vide.

One of my lifelong regrets is that I was not beautiful, and what is more, that I turned for love to those who could not but reject me.

He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It's as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts.

I listen to you, but all I want to remember is your skin, your smell, the life that pulses within you.

He says: It's a letter that was written a long time ago but never sent. It's addressed to you. It starts with your first name. It dates from August 1984.

Dans le spectacle de son absence, c'est sa présence que je reconnais.

Oui, sa seule présence aurait suffi à m'éloigner du temps passé et à me rendre fort. Au fond, c'est pour elle et elle seule que j'écris, pour faire semblant, pour me tromper, pour me convaincre qu'elle est encore à m'attendre, où qu'elle soit. Et qu'elle entend tout ce que j'ai à lui dire. Écrire me fait vivre à deux.

Depuis, il n'y a pas un jour où je n'ai regretté ce baiser que je ne lui ai pas donné. « Bonne route... » m'a-t-elle dit. Ce furent ses derniers mots. Et ce sont mes petits trésors. Je les ai encore dans l'oreille, intacts, et je les fais jouer chaque soir. Bonne route... Je n'ai plus son visage, mais j'ai sa voix, je le jure.

Oui, sans le connaître, sans même avoir jamais vu ses traits, je lui en ai voulu. Être jaloux d'un mort. Vouloir être à sa place.

Kiss me again: If I now wanted heat of youth, these fires, In Priam's veins, would thaw his frozen blood, Enabling him to get a second Hector For the defence of Troy.

Every time we see a man who has attained our human ideal a little more fully than we have, it wakens our languid blood and fills us with new longings.