Quotes About Longing

Water beaded across her shoulders, shining like drops of milk, and her breasts swayed in the currents. It was the kind of vision you never really get over. I couldn't help it, I wanted to go and lick the milk beads from her shoulders. I opened my mouth. I wanted something. Something, I didn't know what. Mother, forgive.

I cannot forget that you left me. That knowledge will always remain in a corner of me, but I wish to let myself be loved.

I said out loud, Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is. Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing. Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.

I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn't choose. But sitting here now, I knew if I'd accepted Israel's proposal, I would've regretted that, too. I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to.

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

Then you called me daughter. You called out your love." She went and knelt beside Yaltha's chair. "I cannot forget that you left me. That knowledge will always remain in a corner of me, but I wish to let myself be loved.

The days he was away crept on tiny, unhurried feet.

There was so much in the world to be had and not had.

They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I'd ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness.

Yaltha's words returned to me: You have your destiny, too. They stirred the old longings in me, the terrible need for my own life.

Aunt-Sister would've said, 'Let her go, it's past the time,' but I wanted the pain of mauma's face and hands more than the peace of being without them.

There was something strangely beautiful about this, the coming together of two ways of life that I'd thought irreconcilable: duty and longing

Is there an odyssey the female soul longs to make at the approach of fifty – one that has been blurred and lost within a culture awesomely alienated from soul? If so, what sort of journey would that be? Where would it take me?

stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I'd ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness.

and longing. We slipped into Mother's room while she was occupied in the courtyard and lifted

I will think only of him. I will give him more than my presence; I will give him the full attention of my heart. That would be my parting gift to him. I would go with him to the end of his longings.

We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we?

Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only come to nothing?

I'd forgotten how that sort of craving felt, how it rose suddenly and loudly from the pit of my stomach like a flock of startle birds, then floated back down in the slow, beguiling way of feathers.

and I'd be overcome by the little river of sparks that seemed to run beneath all that, the blood/sap/wine, aliveness, whatever it was. It had made me feel bereft over the immensity of the world, the extraordinary things people did with their lives- though, really, I didn't want to do any of those particular things. I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.

All my life, I have run after false gold. You were the only treasure I ever had—and then I lost you.

When you lose your home at a young age, you spend your life looking for its replacement.

The past was all right there before me: generations of Koreans separated by division; decades of longing, loss, hurt, regret, guilt.

It's amazing. I never used to like red cabbage, but now when I get only a teaspoon of it, it's all I can think about. How lovely. How tasty. How not fish it is.