Quotes About Longing

They would go about town sighing and talking to themselves. I love you, they would say to the imagined beloved, though it might have appeared to someone else that they were speaking to a snow shovel or an egg crate.

The way she looked at him, and he knew it, it was clear that she was seeking someone she could love, someone who would love her as if she were once again a girl and the world was young. There was no question that he was capable of such a thing. She could see it in his face and read it in his every expression.

He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.

When you're alone you can long so hard for something like an embrace that you mine it from the air. You find it in meanings that you might not otherwise grasp, for which it is helpful to arise early in the morning, when the mind is clear and the heart is gentle.

He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.

He wanted more than anything in the world to embrace her. But it seemed out of the question. Then she turned to him and stretched out her arms. And he went to her as if he had been born for it.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out of the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

You can come back, his father had said. Why leave if I'll come back? Alessandro had asked, and then had quoted Horace. 'New skies the exile finds, but the heart is still the same.

To the sight of the swallows dying in mid air, Alessandro was finally able to add his own benediction. Dear God, I beg of you only one thing. Let me join the ones I love. Carry me to them, unite me with them, let me see them, let me touch them. And then it all ran together, like a song.

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained.

Having read Lermontov and other Russians, and having stayed up until four in the morning, Alessandro found himself making declarations such as, All I desire is one night with you, after which I will quickly cause myself to be disemboweled.

And where is home? Is it where we begin or where we end up? Is it where we long to be or where life puts us to make good use of our gifts?

All those things for which we have no words are lost.

Like any fine artist, he controlled the tension of the audience's longing. You desired, unwittingly, a certain kind of roll or climb, or a return to a certain portion of the air, and he fulfilled your hope slantingly, like a poet, or evaded it until you thought you would burst, and then fulfilled it surprisingly, so you gasped and cried out.

When I came home in the middle of the night I was tired; I longed for a tolerant giant, a person as big as a house, to hold me and rock me.

I realize that I have left part of myself in a place where I shall probably never come back.

I have searched for my mother's love in all the corners of the world.

A partir du mois de septembre l'année dernière, je n'ai plus rien fait d'autre qu'attendre un homme : qu'il me téléphone et qu'il vienne chez moi.

Dark and sweet, the elixir of love is in her mouth. The more I drink, the more I remember all the things we've never done. I was a ghost until I touched you. Never swallowed mortal food until I tasted you, never understood the spoken word until I found your tongue. I've been a sleepwalker, sad somnambula, hands outstretched to strike the solid thing that could awaken me to life at last. I have only ever stood here under this lamp, against your body, I've missed you all my life.

It's because a real and beautiful voice delicately rends the chest, discovered the heart, and holds it beating against a stainless edge until you long to be pierced utterly. For the voice is everything you do not remember. Everything you should not be able to live without and yet, tragically, do.

She is so beautiful. My Rose. Finer than sculpture, softer than sand. Rose, I'm kissing you now. Oh God, I have to kiss her. I will die if I don't kiss her, I know that now. It is a fact. I will die. It will kill me.

Then she kissed me in that way that makes me hate time.

I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don't know why. And it can only be consoled against the length of her body. Lying down with her for the first time... all the pain I didn't know I had, till at her touch it disappeared like smoke. Is this what purgatory feels like? To burn painlessly? If so, why isn't it called heaven?

The more I drink, the more I remember all the things we've never done. I was a ghost until I touched you. Never swallowed mortal food until I tasted you, never understood the spoken word until I found your tongue. I've been a sleep-walker, sad somnambula, hands outstretched to strike the solid thing that could awaken me to life at last. I have only ever stood here under this lamp, against your body, I've missed you all my life.