Quotes About Longing

I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you: only fear and habit prevent me.

Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked.

I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress.

I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.

You cannot control what you love—you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted.

Sometimes I would walk with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.

Feeling her against me, I was reminded of desire. Would that always be the case now—not desire, but only the reminder of it?

If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have a dream of her at night.

All, Pyle? Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. THen you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who last until you are through.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it.

She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.

Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.

Aimer à loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble.

Männer, die die Stadt für immer verlassen hatten, erinnerten sich manchmal an einem grauen, naßkalten Abend in London des rosigen Schimmers und der glühenden Pracht, die, kaum gesehen, auch schon wieder verblichen; sie fragten sich dann, warum sie die Küste so gehaßt hatten, und solange sie einen Tropfen im Glase hatten, sehnten sie sich danach, dorthin zurückzukehren.

I was sunk deep in my middle age. All the same I laid my head against her breast. 'I have been happy,' I said, 'but I have seen so bored for so long.

If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.

Belief dies away like desire for a woman

I'm still in love, Pyle, and I'm a wasting asset.

People can love without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in at the door, and he was alive, and I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.

Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one's thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.

Not all of it was done by soldiers, or by men. She'd shut her eyes and run her fingers over Jack's shoulders, down his spine, as a blind person might seek to recognise the shape of something. The shape—the ache in her own flesh—of her love for him.

His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.