Quotes About Longing

Any great gift or power or talent is a burden, and this more than any, and you will often long to be free of it. But there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law.

Graduations are full of joy and celebration, but they are also full of broken hearts. It is one of those days when you miss the people you love so much it hurts, when imperfect families and dashed dreams weigh so heavily that you begin to think that everyone else is sitting on top of the world but you.

The great common denominator among women with unloving mothers is the longing for validation—to find someone who will say, "Yes, what you experienced really happened. Yes, your feelings are justified. I understand.

How lovely. The old lady sighed. An office romance. I always wanted an office romance. Of course I never really had a job, which made the situation more challenging. Oh, I worked on an assembly line during World War II, but there weren't very many men around and as my husband was off serving his country, an office romance would have been unpatriotic, don't you think?--Mrs. Ford

I don't do this, he continued. I don't get involved. But I've never wanted anyone as much as I want you. It started out as chemistry, pure sexual attraction. I don't even know what to call it. But it's different now. It's bigger and I can't control it and I can't not be with you.

He grabbed her and pulled her against him. I've missed you, he said right before he kissed her.

I'll have you know I was wildly in love with Ford long before he was dangerous. No one truly loves like a fourteen-year-old girl.

Wanting struck him like lightning, burning hot and bright. His breath caught in his throat as the need grew. She fit him perfectly . . . And then there was the kiss. Her mouth was everything he'd hoped for. Hot and sweet and willing.

We can't," he said gently, ignoring the hardness and the pain in his groin. "You deserve better than something hot and fast up against a tree." She swallowed. "I'm not so sure about that.

all the way to her toes...and her soul. Her arms hung at her sides and she curled her fingers into her palms. She wanted to touch him, she wanted to hold him and be held, only it wasn't that simple.

some things, like love, might be worth hoping for. That it was okay to long for it, even in the face of the impossible.

I realized then how much alike we were. Both of us looked backwards to a beloved time that was lost to us, a time where everything had been beautiful. Both of us looked forward to some time and place that would be better. And both of us were here, now, in a grim, unhappy time where little was as we wanted it to be. We lived in our memories and in our hopes, enduring the present because we had no other choice, and because we loved the people who lived here with us.

When you know all of those things exist for other people but not for you, sometimes it's very hard to endure the not having.

Desire has no history...

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

The longing to touch / be touched. I feel gratitude when I touch someone—as well as affection, etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body—and that there are bodies in the world.

Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting.

But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.

Everyone else not real-very distant, small figures. I would have to swim a thousand miles to reach the margin of the relationship, on the other side of which might lie other people, and it was too far, I was too tired. The almost infinitely extending network of that relationship; its dense weave That's what held me-

How far from the beginning are we? When did we first start to feel the wound? … This staunchless wound, the great longing for another place. To make this place another.

Because my wanting isn't strong—it fears risks, it demands approval…

And it is in this gap between resemblance and identity that nostalgic desire arises. The nostalgic is enamored of distance, not of the referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss.

This girl, when she became a woman, would risk all, sacrifice all, overlook and endure all in order to be one with her beloved.