Quotes About Longing

Don't you think a man better appreciates love when he has been forced for so long to go without?

To be human is to want that which we can not have.

Some of you have been waiting for years to read this, the final volume of my autobiography.

My heart lays on the ground, hopeing one day you will be there to pick it up

You take the breath right out of me You left a hole where my heart should be

I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave." - from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing.

In the window I see our ghosts against the black gloss of glass. She put her arm around me, and I think how we maybe never left the business end.

Yes, I agree with Tennyson, who wrote, " 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." But heartbreak knocks the wind out of you, and the feelings of loss and longing can make getting out of bed a monumental task. Learning to trust and lean in to love again can feel impossible.

The more difficult it is for us to articulate our experiences of loss, longing, and feeling lost to the people around us, the more disconnected and alone we feel.

Grief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness--we feel as if we're missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but is now painfully gone...Longing is not conscious wanting; it's an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we've lost.

Writer Mary Jo Putney says, "What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.

Never underestimate the power of being seen - it's exhausting to keep working against yourself when someone truly see and loves you....I was filled with grief and longing. Grief for the girl who never belonged anywhere and a longing to figure out who I was, what I liked, what I beloved in, and where I wanted to go.

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political,among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love's promise.

Spirituality is the deep human longing to experience the transcendent in our ordinary life—it's the expectation to experience the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miraculous in the mundane, and the sacred camouflaged in the profane.

We define nostalgia as a yearning for the way things used to be in our often idealized and self-protective version of the past.

betrayal usually happens long before the other ones. I'm talking about the betrayal of disengagement. Of not caring. Of letting the connection go. Of not being willing to devote time and effort to the relationship.

But here's the dilemma: Why is "how-to" so alluring when, truthfully, we already know "how to" yet we're still standing in the same place longing for more joy, connection, and meaning?

I admitted, still drinking in his eyes, his amazing face. I never seemed to get enough of that.

tuga zbog onoga Å¡to nije moglo biti, ne umire nikad...

the first thing you learn about desire is that it does not wear down with time. there comes a time when you can no longer get your pleasure but the desire stays with you— a dampish kind of feeling beneath the armpits at the back of the tongue. — Brenda Marie Osbey, from "Desire and Private Griefs" All Saints (Louisiana State University Press, 1997)

The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152

Perhaps the gut issue is not how much theology we have studied or how much Scripture we have memorized. All that really matters is this: Have you experienced the furious longing of God or not?

The foundation of the furious longing of God is the Father who is the originating Lover, the Son who is the full self-expression of that Love, and the Spirit who is the original and inexhaustible activity of that Love, drawing the created universe into itself.

The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all.