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Wistful Quotes

Browse 11 quotes about Wistful.

Wistful Quotes

“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.”

LongingTime PassingWistful
Book:Enigma Variations
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“When Lamb turned around and saw the girl working her legs and sweating and squinting into the sun - Christ, what can a man say? It was like his bones had been wired tight all his life and seeing her that way, everything suddenly went slack, his mind unwinding like a spool of loose thread. What a man she rendered him, simply by being a girl who could be picked up and moved: what he wanted to be, what he ought to be, what was most unintelligible and unplanned and true in him when he carried her out of her fettered world to this. How powerful she was as long as she asserted no will of her own.”

HauntingCruelWistful
Book:Lamb
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“In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”

ImportantPastTurning PointsHindsightWistful
Book:The Remains of the Day
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“Eve was happy for her bestie. She just wished she had a guy who would look at her the way Seth looked at her friend, eyes all starry. No, that wasn't it. Or it wasn't completely it. Eve knew there were guys at school who liked her and would give her the Seth-look if she gave them the opportunity. But she didn't want the look from any of those guys. She wanted the look she could give the look back to. She wanted to find a guy she could all-out love who would all-out love her back.”

LoveHappinessLongingWistfulEve EvergoldGirl Problems
Book:Fever
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“He does not forget—it has been a long time since he has been able to forget—that he is making his stand in the middle of a dying town in the midst of a wasting country, from which many have departed and much has been sent away, a land wasting and dying for want of the human names and knowledge that could give it life.”

WistfulAgrarian
Book:The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership
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