Quotes About Longing

The internet has eliminated so much wonder and romance.

If you don't start with crazy, crazy love, the kind of love that Van Morrison sings about, then you don't have a shot to go the distance.

say and the problem with books is that they end. They seduce you. They spread their legs to you and pull you inside. And you go deep and leave your possessions and your ties to the world at the door and you like it inside and you don't want for your possessions or your ties and then, the book evaporates. You turn the page and there is nothing

Everyone wants everything right now but you are able to wait with Such small hands.

The atmosphere changes immediately. And there's an out of the way place where your mind stores things. You can't reach it yourself. It's like the game Operation and you are the body and someone else has to have a steady hand, they have to poke that part of you, that hot spot. When you get what you want, what you always wanted, what it means to be you is to want this thing and now you have it and there is a roar. Love.

The wanting overwhelms me, the way it does sometimes. I hit the mute button and I feel my heartbeat quicken as I dial her number. I know I shouldn't.

I care and I want to know more and I want to cry and I don't want you to fall for anyone but me.

because this morning you didn't know you were gonna want me.

But the most important thing I know is that I want the possibility of you more than the reality of Karen Minty.

But, know this, Beck: Every day I find a way to visit the pictures of you in my phone. I'm faithful.

You love your writing, your friends, your city, men like Benji. And what all those have in common is that they will never love you back. While you give everything.

It didn't occur to me that there was something decidedly odd in finding a box of razor blades aesthetically appealing. I wonder if a heroin addict loves the elegant simplicity of the needle, if a drinker romances the curve and shape of the bottle.

The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable — What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness?

Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.

So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary.

Anyone who's ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some undefinable tide has turned forever and you can't go back. You need it; it's a central part of who you are.

Among other things, he [Thomas] insist he will perish if he cannot take me to Venice and watch me fall into a canal.

I loved them desperately. For four years I lived for them.

Yet every time I saw Arthur my heart sank.

What a hard thing it is to write of love! Easy enough to describe the burning brand of lust, or yearning of infatuation, that yearning that can never be assuaged. But love! There is only the word, and the knowing it.

Guess you never know how much you like the water until the well runs dry, and if I can't have your love unconditionally, then I'll just have to do without it until you grow up.

The tanks dug ladders in the earth no one was able to climb In every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth And the corpse The corpse is never mentioned In the hours before his empty body was found It was this, this life that he longed for, this that he wrote of desiring, Yet this life leaves out everything for which he lived

An ache of hope that you will come back— the cawing flock is not your coming — Carolyn Forché, from "Travel Papers," In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin Press, 2020)

In the night I come to you and it seems a shame to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.