Quotes About Longing

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand.

Whatever you want the most, it's going to be the worst thing for you.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.

I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.

Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day. Dreaming of coffee. I'm afraid I didn't miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee.

We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony. If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

The flatness was stultifying. She wouldn't say this aloud because in light of other worries it seemed self-indulgent, but Willa missed mountains. Missed them hard, with the psychic equivalent of a toothache.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no longer a place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

I am looking for the door to another world. I've waited thousands of years. Take me.

Love. But the pure kind of love. I don't think that comes very often. Most of us are ordinary. If we do anything great, it's only so we'll be loved ourselves. Maybey just for ten minutes.

I was born to wish for more than I can have.

The hopeless wishes that won't quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.

Dellarobia noted they were not a perfect physical match: Nelda plump and rosy-cheeked, her mother fine-boned. The resemblance blazed in their wide brown eyes and the way they nodded, the gnomy caps bobbing. Mother-daughter adventurers. She felt a pang of longing, as she often did in church. Everybody had a mother and a God; those were standard issue.

you've not seen the far end of lonely.

Sometimes I tell her: Mommy Mommy. I just say that. Father isn't listening so I can say it. Her real name is Mother and Misrus Price but her secret name to me is Mommy Mommy. He went away on the airplane and I said, "Mama, I hope he never comes back." We cried then.

Well, that's how thick I am, I never knew how to want what everyone wants. I only thought to look for a home, some place to be taken in. Handing over a crumpled heart, seeing it dropped in the wastepaper basket every time. Here, though. Americans sent love letters in return.

I was afraid of crying if I couldn't touch her.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

It's hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down.

I wasn't keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always looking ahead for the perfect home, where trains never wrecked and hearts never broke, where no one you loved ever died.

Estevan took off his shirt and lay back against the front of the boat, his hands clasped behind his head, exposing his smooth Mayan chest to the sun. And to me. How could he possibly have done this, if he had any idea how I felt? I knew that Estevan had walked a long, hard road beyond innocence, but still he sometimes did the most simple, innocent, heartbreaking things.