Quotes About Longing

Proust's Law (are you listening?) is twofold:(a) What least thing our self-love longs for mostOthers instinctively withhold;(b) Only when time has slain desireIs his wish granted to a smiling ghostNeither harmed nor warmed, now, by the fire.

I regret that I should leave this world without again beholding him.

The emotional equivalent of jet lag is the end of a love affair and yet you, foolish and besotted lover, won't let go. You're still keeping time by his sun and moon, waking when he wakes, and sleeping only when he closes his eyes.

Because what's worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?

Long, beautiful, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen... I adore hair!

The way things broken off a little too soon can last forever.

The warmth of the bourbon still glowed deep within her, helping her find her center. How could something so simple have brought her so much relief? But Safia sensed it wasn't truly the alcohol so much as the kindness. She had forgotten what that was like. It had been too long. Not since…not

Traveling— it had captured my heart, and now my heart was calling me home.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

Things of the world try to connect. Prodigal rain issues from a sky into which trees rise like pleading hands. Days bear us lightly across the face of the world as every year the ground pulls harder, recalling like a spurned lover, ever more fixedly, how much it wants us.

Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one's own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.

I watched you while you were sleeping and you looked completely at peace. I wish I could feel that. I wish I could close my eyes and feel at peace. But I can't. I can't feel anything if I'm not with you, and even then all I can do is want something that I don't think I can ever have, at least not now. so I left this, and my peace, with you. Stark.

For there are two things not easily controlled, and they are hunger and jealousy.

I couldn't even picture Mavis's face anymore. It was sad. She was being erased. I wanted to put my finger on her forehead, but there was nothing there.

My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you passing over again, fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistake that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.

Absence, with all its pains, is, by this charming moment, wiped away.

And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.

It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

And beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?' 'To live,' said Camilla. 'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever''.

a morbid longing for the picturesque at all cost.

We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it? To live.

And the flavor of Pippa's kiss—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

Over and over, I kept thinking I've got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can't.