Quotes About Longing

If I could stay — For me you'll always be here, she softly interrupted.

I adore a moat,' said Isabel. 'Good-bye.

Now that he was alone with her all the passion he had never stifled surged into his senses; it hummed in his eyes and made things swim round him.

When I tell you I love you it's simply what I came for. I thought it was for something else; but it was for that. I shouldn't say it if I didn't believe I should never see you again. It's the last time — let me pluck a single flower! I've no right to say that, I know; and you've no right to listen. But you don't listen; you never listen, you're always thinking of something else.

Kuljeskelen täällä. En kyllästy tähän. Eikä minun pitäisikään - tämä sopii minulle niin hyvin. Jumaloin tätä paikkaa. Minulla ei ole pienintäkään halua luopua tästä. -Teistä olisi siis mieluisaa elää täällä? -Luullakseni minusta olisi mieluisaa kuolla täällä.

I've thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I'm exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true.

His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.

I shall always think of you; I shall never think of anyone else. I came to England simply because you are here; I couldn't stay at home after you had gone: I hated the country because you were not in it. If I like this country at present it is only because it holds you.

His long looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make them most completely her possession.

She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs.

I cling to some saving romance in things.

The end of everything was at hand; it seemed to him he could stretch out his arm and touch the goal. But he wanted to die at home — to extend himself in the large quiet room where he had last seen his father lie, and close his eyes upon the summer dawn.

But the sense that it was his last chance, that he loved her and had lost her, that she would think him a fool whatever he should say, suddenly gave him a lash and added a deep vibration to his low voice.

Your desire is to escape everything? Everything.

She longed for opportunities, but these were not the opportunities she meant.

She liked him — she had liked him all the while; now anything might happen! She was ready — she had been ready always, waiting for him to speak. If he had not spoken she would have waited for ever; but when the word came she dropped like the peach from the shaken tree.

Ah, I must see Ralph! Isabel wailed; not in resentment, not in the quick passion her companion had looked for; but in a tone of far-reaching, infinite sadness.

There isn't a thing I can imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it backward for its sweet simplicity.

There were hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a connection more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy with them in life.

Oh," said Strether, "what I want is a thing I've ceased to measure or even to understand.

She was the blessing that had now become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he had lost himself?

I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.

She may be lying in bed reading a book, she may be making love with a prize fighter, or she may be running like mad through a field of stubble, one shoe one, one shoe off, a man named Corn Cob pursuing her hotly. Wherever she is I am standing in complete darkness; her absence blots me out.

It was the end for me. And yet not an end. In all the years which have since elapsed she remains the woman I loved and lost, the unattainable one [...] I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable. —Henry Miller, Stand Still like the Hummingbird (1962)