Quotes About Longing

Ten times a day it stopped me like a bolt into my chest: that she was no longer here. That she would never be here. That I might walk and walk and yet I would never again come home to her.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin. But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?

Romantic love is not an emotion. … It's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind.

Zosia, with the long arm of their mother, lobbing Mom across the ocean.

The thing about longing is this: It is easy to feel equal to wanting. It is rare to feel equal to having.

Home is the place where we've felt the most, I will tell him. And that can be anyplace. Or anyone. It doesn't matter how long you lived there. It's what you'll always want to come back to.

When love is at its best, one loves so much that he cannot forget.

In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: 'Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.' He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.

On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.

I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk's eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.

Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.

To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me…

I remembered something from a short story I'd read, about how the girl you want is the girl you see once and then she is nowhere to be found. The girl who does not appear in the crowded room.

The night passes slowly, as it must when your wish is that another's won't come true.

I'd have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place.

I was learning the ways of the world; one of them being that the presence of a certain type of curly-haired man - your type - will cause you to fidget and fidget until the only way to reach some level of calm is to touch him.

Do you want this ice cream?" he asked her, whisking the dish all around the tabletop. "I mean, do you truly want it? Would you fight for this ice cream? Would you bear a deep wound in order to possess this ice cream completely? How deep a wound? What if it was as deep as the grave? What does this ice cream really mean to you, Miss Cabrini?

I miss her. So much that sometimes I'm scared I'll bring her back.

I hate that my life is teaching me that I can only be loved if I put my love out of reach and just drift above people until they love my remoteness.

Mr. Fox didn't come, he didn't come, he didn't.

The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it's ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot. Snow

While waiting for her to phone me at school I'd feel seconds bursting inside me and leaving clouds. That won't come again—it can't. I'll never have that with anyone else. I'll never even come close.

Mary. If you were real I'd run away with you forever.