Quotes About Longing

Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation. The House of Mirth

She was something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.

It's a hundred years since we've met - it may be another hundred before we meet again.

Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.

She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain.

The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an over-mastering longing to be with her again.

What's the use—when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.

There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.

But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true.

Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed.

Yes, you have been away a very long time. Oh, centuries and centuries; so long, she said, that I'm sure I'm dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;

Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can't offer you?

Cuando estamos separados y deseo verte, cada pensamiento se consume en una gran llama... entonces llegad, y eres tanto más de lo que recordaba, y lo que quiero de ti tanto más que una hora o dos de vez en cuando, con desiertos de sedienta espera en los intervalos, que soy perfectamente capaz de quedarme quieto a tu lado, como ahora, simplemente confiando con tranquilidad en que todo llegará a ser real.

Since then there has been no farther communication between them, and he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings

There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting fourth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder

Why do you do this to me? she cried. Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead? No, I have nothing to give you instead, he said, sitting up and turning so that he faced her. If I had, it should be yours, you know.

Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things.

Undine leaned close enough for her lowered voice to reach him. 'Can't you understand that, knowing how they all feel about me and how Ralph feels - I'd give almost anything to get away?' Her father looked at her compassionately. 'I guess most of us feel that way once in a way when we're young, Undine. Later on you'll see going away ain't much use when you've got to turn around and come back.

La añoranza lo acompañaba día y noche como un incesante e indefinible deseo, como el súbito antojo de un enfermo por comer o beber algo que alguna vez probó y había olvidado por mucho tiempo

The longed-for ships come empty home, founder on the deep And eyes first lose their tears and then their sleep.

Every step she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment and the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief.

He paused, conscious that he had failed in his attempt to speak with the indifference of a man who longs for a change, and is yet too weary to welcome it.