Longing Quotes

I really should be studying now, but you're much more important to me than a .50 calibre machine gun.

The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.

Margaret Mitchell

Witch, do this for me,Find me a moonmade of longing.Then cut it sliver thin,and having cut it,hang it highabove my beloved's house,so that she may look uptonightand see it,and seeing it, sigh for meas I sigh for her,moon or no moon.

Clive Barker

The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are-in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead center of a desert-and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed.

Anuradha Roy

The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.

Anne Michaels

Oh, I wish I lived in a caravan!’ said Jimmy longingly. ‘How lovely it must be to live in a house that has wheels and can go away down the lanes and through the towns, and stand still in fields at night!

Enid Blyton

My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him, All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression- What an awkward woman am I. My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moonBut instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon. But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way. My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls...Still, the love from my heart is overflowing, As bright and crimson as the heated metal in a blacksmith's forge.

Kim Dong Hwa

He lived to near the things he loved to seem poetical.

E.M. Forster

Clairey knew well that it was one thing to occupy his bed, quite another to occupy his heart.

Tracy Winegar

Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.

Peter Høeg

Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.

John O'Donohue

It isnt for wantof something to say--something to tell you--something you should know--but to detain you--keep you from going--feeling myself hereas long as you are--as long as you are

Cid Corman

Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.

Juliet Marillier

We have it in our head that if we fill our stomachs, we’ll fill our hearts.

Kate Wicker

We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food.

Kate Wicker

Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

David Mitchell

He was what the egotistical part of me had always longed for: danger, sexiness, popularity, style, unpredictability. The kind of man who'd always keep me guessing. Just one night with him and i'd already started to wonder if perhaps i'd spent the last two years in a comfortable coma.

Lucy Robinson

Did you know, that one night; one moonless, clear, shining night; with the shadowy silhouettes of trees crisp against the star-filled sky – I, on the high, level terrace of my flat, stretched out my hand! Against all odds and possibilities of unbelief and grief – a life of searchings, discontent, and a nagging sense of unreality… A spider-web intuition of a spread-out, intricate illusion that wilfully withheld the truth from me.

Radhika Mukherjee

I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Time no longer mattered. He knew he would have plenty of it at his disposal. The sight of the star filled him with indescribable longing.

J. Valor

I wanted so terribly to be good to him.

Dodie Smith

She didn’t know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn’t know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.

Michelle Tea

How about this?” she retorted, her voice deceptively flirtatious, and in that small, stolen moment in his mind, he quickly spun and grasped her by the small of her back, pulled her close into to him, and made her his. And maybe she resisted at first before giving in, or maybe she didn’t—maybe she’d wanted this just as long as he had. But none of that would matter, because they would finally be together, starting at that moment and for the rest of their lives. And they would love each other and raise children and make music, and life would suddenly be worth living, and Christ, how could anyone ever throw something like that away?

J. Tonzelli

Oh, if only I could hurt with such misery once again, to feel the powers of love here inside my heart, the joys of heaven and the pains of hell!

Victor Villaseñor

I felt a wave of longing roll out of me, but not the way it usually did, diffuse and sad. This was hopeful, as though it had been coaxed out by a whispered promise.

Michele Jaffe

They should not clench their fists,it’s my longing that’s drawing me near to them;they should not stand there full of rage,my longing is timidly drawing near to them;they should not be ready to pounce like vicious dogs,as if they wanted to tear my longing to shreds;they should not threaten with broad sleeves,that pains my longing.Why have they suddenly changed?As great and deep is my longing.No matter how difficult, no matter how menacing:I must reach them and I’m already there.

Robert Walser

What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I do,” Drew admitted, his eyes devouring my body appreciatively. “But with you…I want so much more, Summer. So much more than you’re willing to give me.” He paused, “Every single touch, every single look you give me, I cherish.

Kailin Gow

All longings the essence for real liberation only, Freedom from all sides, an ultimate supremacy;- 43 -

Munindra Misra

When we parted, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, I leaned over to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘If you do find paradise,’ she said, turning to leave, ‘send me a grape.

Adam Leith Gollner

In the distance,far over there, only the eyes can travel when the body is weary.

Yvette Christiansë

His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain.

Maggie Stiefvater

Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment.

Donna Tartt

If only they could listen with their hearts & not their minds, maybe then they would understand that often times it's the emotions not spoken that are longing to be heard.

Christine Upton

[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.

Rebecca Solnit

Then he lets go and walks down the path, without another word. He doesn't look back. But I watch him go. I watch him all the way home.

Allie Condie in Matched

I thought once how Theocritus had sungOf the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,Who each one in a gracious hand appearsTo bear a gift for mortals, old or young;And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,Those of my own life, who by turns had flungA shadow across me. Straightaway I was 'ware,So weeping, how a mystic Shape did moveBehind me, and drew me backward by the hair;And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--Guess now who holds thee?--Death, I said, But, there,The silver answer rang,--Not Death, but Love.

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. 'That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.

Alexander McCall Smith

There’s a time when it all comes together—what you long for and what you fear—and as tentative as you may feel, you’re driven to continue. At that point, the need to forge ahead is the only option, and your direction is defined despite yourself.

Lorii Myers

To long to read.

A. Cretan

Methinks I lied all winter, when I sworeMy love was infinite, if spring makes it more.

John Donne

We fear what we long for. This is the paradox.

Tony Brasunas

Amelie seemed to focus on her again. For a few seconds she regarded her, frowning, and then smiled just a little. "So I recall," she said. "Not all wars are waged with bullets and swords, indeed. Some are wars of wills and ideas. It's good we both remember that." The smile faded. "But not all ideas win the war, and not all wills are strong enough. Darkness can descend so easily.

Rachel Caine

I’m always soft for you, that’s the problem. You could come knocking on my door five years from now and I would open my arms wider and say ‘come here, it’s been too long, it felt like home with you.

Azra T.

Let’s call my mood melancholy; let’s call it remembrance. Or maybe let’s call it longing. Yes, let’s call it longing instead.

Shannon Celebi

...and when he dies, cut him out in little stars, and the face of heaven will be so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no heed to the garish sun.

William Shakespeare

Surely some revelation is at hand.

W.B. Yeats

She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It's not that I wait for you.It's that my arms are doors I cannot close.

Derrick Brown

When we lay together, she showed me her soul, and I showed her mine, and they were the same. As you can imagine, mine was battered and bruised, tarnished like ancient metal. She scrubbed it clean. I cannot deny my own soul any more than I can deny she held it in her hands for a time.

Carol Oates

I gave up hoping...But, still, I would think of him, I would cherish his image in my mind, and treasure every word, look and gesture that memory could retain.

Anne Brontë

The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Love a girl and she will give you a story to tell,Love a woman and she will give you a novel to pen...

Dinesh Kumar Biran

Some people are like swings...They give us an exciting thing to do for a while..Thereafter leave us alone, dizzy and not very far ahead in life...

Dinesh Kumar Biran

To feel such a longing for his own life, even as he’s living it—he wonders what that means.

David Levithan

Sometimes, one yearns for something.For the ultimate in happiness. I yearn for it,and don't know where to look for it any longer. And I don't know if I would recognize it if I found it. And the longer I look, the more selfish I grow.For I think only of my own happiness. i think I have lost the ability to make someone else happy. If I ever had it. And I suppose we can never be happy unless we can also give happiness.

Mary Balogh

Perhaps it is better not to tell what you wish. if you cannot have it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

There is a legend that everything that falls into the waters of this river -- leaves, insects, the feathers of birds -- is transformed into the rocks that make the riverbed. If only I could tear out my heart and hurl it into the current, then my pain and longing would be over, and I could finally forget.

Paulo Coelho

In his heart, some tiny piece of what hadn't happened would lodge.

Simon Van Booy

Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality.

Ronald Rolheiser

1 2 3 … 9 Next

Longing Quotes

Related Topics