Quotes About Longing

Ravikant, Naval: "'Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want' (paraphrased

Leonard Cohen is my patron saint. Try "Dance Me to the End of Love" or "Famous Blue Raincoat," or pretty much anything else he's ever written, including, of course, "Hallelujah," his best-known song but really only the tip of the Leonard iceberg! Also: "Hinach Yafah (You Are Beautiful)" by Idan Raichel. It's a gorgeous song of longing for the beloved, but really it's about longing in general.

Leonard Cohen, even though when I met him I was too tongue-tied to say anything. Anyway, I've given away a number of copies of his Book of Longing, since it articulates a sense of the compassionate

Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want." Desire is a driver, a motivator. In fact, a sincere and uncompromising desire, placed above everything else, is nearly always fulfilled.

Love, tenderness, and compassion are universal human emotions that have long quickened the heart and informed the spirit.

Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. 1

Every day I carry the weight of your absence" The Perfume Thief

Where then did I get my longing to see the world, my fetish for printed paper, my love of books, and above all that burning desire to leave Florence, to travel, to go to the ends of earth? Where did I get this yearning for always being somewhere else? Certainly not from my parents, with their deep roots in the city where they were born and grew up, which they had left only once, for their honeymoon in Prato -- ten miles away.

Knowing someone isn't coming back doesn't mean you ever stop waiting

It led to the unrelenting hunger of hearts, to lustful, searching eyes, and creeping, confident hands, to souls who believed that what they could touch they could own.

I am haunted by every person I have ever loved.

Darren's lack of milk shake right now feels like some sort of war crime. Like someone should contact Amnesty International.

In fact, desire is sustained dissatisfaction. This state of sustained dissatisfaction is the normal state for subjects within a society of prohibition. Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who remain securely within the confines of the social order.

A desire of desires: the melancholy.

Each day the pair would meet at 2pm at the exact halfway point between the villages and stand a hundred yards apart, staring longingly at each other, yearning for the time when the pestilence would pass.

John suppressed his desire to snap back and shock. It wasn't even that. His desire, almost physical, to speak of what he and Frank had done, we doing. He worried that his experiences would not be fully legible until then, even to himself. He wished to make them permanent, whole, to give them a place in the world. Every day, memories tugged fiercely for release. Words, details, salivated on his tongue.

Their relationship had become like the river - smooth and constant, but sluggish, opaque. They were standing on opposite banks, watching it go by. He dared not interrupt it - smash its calm, swim across - for fear of forcing some irrevocable change, for fear of losing even his current unloved place, or worse of struggling, flailing, of Edith not coming out to meet him, not even outstretching an arm.

I do miss home, especially my parents, but my work keeps me occupied most of the time.

Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless.

I love 'Ocean Avenue' by Yellowcard. That's always been one of my favorites.

I miss the ocean; I miss Fenway.

I think there's a lot of people in their dingy boats in the middle of the ocean pining for the days of closed-ended narrative.

I miss London on nights in June or in October.