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Longing Quotes

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Longing Quotes

“In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed. Underneath this chaos and clutter lies a longing for more elemental things--love, beauty, comfort, a short spell of oblivion once in a while.”

LoveComfortLongingWinterDebtNeedConsumerismOblivionClutter
Book:Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
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“We all thirst for recreation. Even a modest person occasionally needs to take a piquant break from work to renew their salty internal drive. What I cannot understand was why a diet of simply surviving, peppered with some lowbrow form of amusement, proved inadequate to satiate my deepest angst. Why do I crave meaning in life? Why do I hunger for some essential substance in life beyond sampling a banquet of consumer pleasures? My entrenched state of ignorance precludes me from describing what garnish is missing from an unfilled life.”

PleasureLongingMemoir WritingSearch For MeaningWantingSearch For TruthUnfulfilledSelf TruthSearch For Happiness
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“As I tried to doze, the incident on the piazzetta, lost somewhere amid the Piave war memorial and our ride up the hill with fear and shame and who knows what else pressing on me, seemed to come back to me from summers and ages ago, as though I'd biked up to the piazzetta as a little boy before World War I and had returned a crippled ninety-year-old soldier confined to this bedroom that was not even my own, because mine had been given over to a young man who was the light of my eyes. The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that's what you are, light of my life. I didn't know what light of my eyes meant, and part of me wondered where on earth had I fished out such claptrap, but it was nonsense like this that brought tears now, tears I wished to drown in his pillow, soak in his bathing suit, tears I wanted him to touch with the tip of his tongue and make sorrow go away.”

SorrowRomanticLongingCryingSimileCall Me By Your NameAndre AcimanOliver And ElioLight Of My LifeLight Of My Eyes
Book:Call Me by Your Name
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“For a moment, there is silence between us. He takes a step toward me. “The other night—” I cut him off. “I did it for the same reason that you did. To get it out of my system.” “And is it?” he asks. “Out of your system?” I look him in the face and lie. “Yes.” If he touches me, if he even takes another step toward me, my deceit will be exposed. I don’t think I can keep the longing off my face. Instead, to my relief, he gives a thin-lipped nod and departs. From the next room, I hear the Roach call out to Cardan, to offer to teach him the trick of levitating a playing card. I hear Cardan laugh. It occurs to me that maybe desire isn’t something overindulging helps. Maybe it is not unlike mithridatism; maybe I took a killing dose when I should have been poisoning myself slowly, one kiss at a time.”

DesireSexLonging
Book:The Wicked King
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“While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies. Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love. What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”

DesireLonging
Book:The Architecture of Happiness
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“What a strange thing that grief can become need in moments, in breaths, in the strength of his hands. Maybe it’s shelter. Maybe distraction. Or something else entirely. But there is old pain in me and we kiss as though we have kissed a thousand times before, as though in other lives we kissed every day, we kiss as though we have been waiting years to do so.”

LoveDesireGriefHealingLongingIntimacyVulnerabilityBittersweetPast LivesEmotional Complexity
Book:Wild Dark Shore
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“From the moment I first heard the sound of your voice, my heart took control and was captivated by every vibration. A spark of this fire must have always been within me. Each of your actions only increases my desire for more of you and forces me to crave your presence even more. It is the sound of a lover's voice that I so desperately long for, not the memories of a love that is no longer mine.”

LoveRomanceDesirePassionLongingYearningHeartfeltEnchantment
Author:Rolf van der Wind
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“He takes a step toward me. 'The other night-' I cut him off. 'I did it for the same reason that you did. To get it out of my system.' 'And it it?' he asks. 'Out of your system?' I look him in the face and lie. 'Yes.' If he touches me, if he even takes another step toward me, my deceit will be exposed. I don't think I can keep the longing off my face. Instead, to my relief, he gives a thin-lipped nod and departs. ... It occurs to me that maybe desire isn't something overindulging helps. Maybe it is not unlike mithridatism; maybe I took a killing dose when I should have been poisoning myself slowly, one kiss at a time.”

LyingDesireLongingHolly BlackThe Folk Of The AirJude DuarteCardan GreenbriarJudeCardanThe Wicked King
Book:The Wicked King
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“What was it, token of all our wordless and incongruent hunger that one saw here, that has never been expressed, that was so imminent, so exasperating, so impalpably near, as if the opiate of finality we had sought for our exacerbated nerves, the complete nurture we needed to stop the jaws of Cerberus was here almost within our grasp, an inch away from hope, a hand's breadth off from certainty.”

DesireLongingFrustration
Book:The Good Child's River
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