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Longing Quotes

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Longing Quotes

“البَابُ مَا قَرَعَتْهُ غَيْرُ الرِّيحِ في اللَّيْلِ العَمِيقْ البَابُ مَا قَرَعَتْهُ كَفُّكِ . أَيْنَ كَفُّكِ وَالطَّرِيقْ نَاءٍ ؟ بِحَارٌ بَيْنَنَا ، مُدُنٌ ، صَحَارَى مِنْ ظَلاَمْ الرِّيحُ تَحْمِلُ لِي صَدَى القُبْلاَتِ مِنْهَا كَالْحَرِيقْ مِنْ نَخْلَةٍ يَعْدُو إِلَى أُخْرَى وَيَزْهُو في الغَمَامْ”

“We're a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision. Our children frighten us in their intimacy, but we make sure they grow up like us. Lukewarm like us. On a night like this, hands and faces hot, we can believe that tomorrow will show us angels in jars and that the well-known woods will suddenly reveal another path. Last time we had a bonfire, a neighbour tried to pull down the boards of his house. [...] I sometimes wonder why none of us tried to stop him. I think we wanted him to do it, to do it for us. To tear down our long-houred lives and let us start again. Clean and simple with open hands.”

“The saints are little pieces of mystical Christ, sick of love for union. The wife of youth, that wants her husband some years, and expects he shall return to her from oversea lands, is often on the shore; every ship coming near shore is her new joy; her heart loves the wind that shall bring him home. She asks at every passenger news: "Oh! saw ye my husband? What is he doing? When shall he come? Is he shipped for a return?" Every ship that carrieth not her husband, is the breaking of her heart. What desires hath the Spirit and Bride to hear, when the husband Christ shall say to the mighty angels, "Make you ready for the journey; let us go down and divide the skies, and bow the heaven: I will gather my prisoners of hope unto me; I can want my Rachel and her weeping children no longer. Behold, I come quickly to judge the nations." The bride, the Lamb's wife, blesseth the feet of the messengers that preach such tidings, "Rejoice, O Zion, put on thy beautiful garments; thy King is coming." Yea, she loveth that quarter of the sky, that being rent asunder and cloven, shall yield to her Husband, when he shall put through his glorious hand, and shall come riding on the rainbow and clouds to receive her to himself.”

“Not the way you long for the future, for the summer, or for a holiday, but the way you long to get back to yourself. To how it was 'in our day,' even though that time never really existed except in our filtered memories. You long to be the person you think you were, during some sort of youth when you tell yourself that life was uncomplicated, or the man you imagine you could have been if only you had the chance to do everything again. Not longing for that is difficult for most people, and for some it is all but impossible.”

“One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.”

“The eye of the mystic who is enraptured in love sees traces of eternal beauty everywhere and listens to the mute eloquence of everything created. Whatever he mentions, his goal is the essence of the beloved—like Zulaykha, who, longing for Joseph's beauty, applied to him "the name of every thing, from rue-seed to aloes-wood." If she piled up a hundred thousand names— her meaning and intention was always Joseph. (M 6:4022-37)”

“I searched for you in the forest– in every trace of sky and soil, in every space of rest and soul. I searched for you along the highway, in every city, in every valley, in every place I stepped in and every door I walked out. I searched for you in my dreams– in every bliss, in every storm, in every wish, in every hope. I searched for you in my thoughts, in every text, in every chord, in every breath, in every song. I searched for you in these verses; in every rhyme, in every word, in every smile, in every poem. I searched for you.”

“I searched for you in this valley– in every ray of sun, in every drop of water. In every purple song, in every sunset mourning. I searched for you in imagined kiss– in every word I couldn’t invent, in every touch I can’t resist. I searched for you at midnight; in every star I looked upon, in every dream, desire and storm. I searched for you right here; in every touch that I keep inventing, in every word I keep repeating. I searched for you.”

“I remembered another evening, when I caught him standing outside on the porch staring out at the deserted quadrangle. It had just snowed and the place couldn't have looked more peaceful or more timeless. I told him not to worry and promised I'd shovel the snow in the morning. "It's not that," he said. I knew it wasn't. He put his arm on my shoulder, which he never did, because he wasn't the touchy-feely sort. "I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking that one day I won't be here to see it and I know I'll miss it, even if I won't have a heartbeat to miss anything. I miss it now for the-days-when, the way I miss places I've never traveled to or things I've never done." "What things that you've never done?" "You're young and you're very handsome how could you possibly understand?" He removed his arm. He lived in a future that wouldn't be his to live in and longed for a past that hadn't been his either. There was no turning back and no going forward. I felt for him.”