Longing Quotes

The waltz held the feeling you get when you finish a well-loved book. It left me longing for something I couldn't name.

~ Louise Miller

I long for the day when I hear the musicwithout any song.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Living a life somewhere else in your mind is nothing more than being a prisoner where you are.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!

~ Héloïse D'argenteuil

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

~ Margaret Atwood

I love you, Jeremy.”He still felt it, that wince of doubt. The urge to push her away. She said it so simply. As though there was nothing easier, more natural in the world. The words themselves hung in the air, so tiny, so bare.Jeremy felt as though she’d thrust a frail, delicate, birdlike thing into his big, clumsy hands, charging him to keep it safe. And God forgive him, his first impulse was to shove it away. He would destroy it, surely. In his desperation, he would grasp it so tightly it would break into a thousand pieces—and his own heart would break along with it.

~ Tessa Dare

I am a lover of words and tragically beautiful things, poor timing and longing, and all things with soul, and I wonder if that means I am entirely broken, or if those are the things that have been keeping me whole.

~ Nicole Lyons

I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

~ Franz Kafka

Like any / unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real /when I’m not being touched.

~ Natalie Wee

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

~ Héloïse D'argenteuil

Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her.

~ Jeanne Duprau

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!And yet they seem alive and quiveringAgainst my tremulous hands which loose the stringAnd let them drop down on my knee to-night.This said, -- he wished to have me in his sightOnce, as a friend: this fixed a day in springTo come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,Yet I wept for it! -- this, ... the paper's light ...Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailedAs if God's future thundered on my past.This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paledWith lying at my heart that beat too fast.And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availedIf, what this said, I dared repeat at last!

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I stopped to think about my Grandpa writing to my Grandma, knowing how much he loved her and how many years he spent without her after her death, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it through just one letter without an onslaught of tears. And it was Grandpa, a voice I knew so well. One that I miss terribly.

~ Kara Martinelli

Um, thanks,” Jackson told her. “And your name is…?”“I’m Margaret, Margaret Van Der Graaf,” she answered with another eerie smile. Her teeth were so white that they looked bleached.“Van Der Graaf?” Jackson repeated, trying to stifle his laughter. He didn’t want to be rude to the only person in sight, to this kind-hearted stranger who was offering to help him, but… Van Der Graaf?“What are you laughing at?” Margaret asked with curiosity, flashing him a calculating gaze. “I like my name. If you’re going to be a jerk, then I won’t help you. You can stay out here on the street through the night for all I care.”“…Harsh,” said Jackson, giving her a quizzical glance back. There was something ‘off’ about her, something that Jackson couldn’t quite place, something that bordered on horrible loneliness and longing. “Who else lives here, Margaret Van Der Graaf?” He couldn’t resist saying her name aloud. Despite its hilarity, it had a nice ring to it. “Who else lives here?” he urged.“Me, myself and I,” said Margaret simply, snickering when she saw his horrified and annoyed expression

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

You can ache for where you come from, and it's homesickness. A relationship, and it's heartbreak. But is there a word for missing your friends like that?

~ Emery Lord

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

~ Fernando Pessoa

For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous and that she should rest content with what she had, but she knew an emptiness deep inside her, which began to ache.

~ Iain Pears

Gavin, I can’t talk to you here. People will call me crazy. My imaginary friend smirked. But you’re already talking to me. Well, I have to stop. His smirk grew cocky. I doubt you can resist. And he was right. There was nothing I wanted more than to give my full attention to an imagined shadow and ignore those who ignored me in the real world. I wanted to talk out loud to Gavin―to play and laugh boisterously with him. In a dream I could justify such behavior, but to succumb to hallucinations while wide awake would only prove me insane.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Your mind is the voice for your heart.

~ Shannon L. Alder

To embrace the message of Christmas is to throw off my hedonistic rebellion and bow before the chafing reality that I can't save myself, and in that very act to be suddenly taken aback in that I've stumbled upon the very freedom I've longed for in the very place I'd least expected it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.

~ Azar Nafisi

All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.

~ Spalding Gray

I recognise your body in liana; your expression in the eyes of a frightened gazelle; the beauty of your face in that of the moon, your tresses in the plumage of peacocks... alas! Timid friend- no one object compares to you.

~ Kālidāsa

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring - these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are worthier of our admiration.

~ Yoshida Kenkō

We ache with the yearningthat turns half into wholeand offer no excusesfor the beauty of our souls.

~ Aberjhani

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.

~ Annie Dillard

All individuals have moral deficiencies, and when introducing these to reality one not only strengthens himself but also the confidence of others in the human exigency for Christ due to a reflection throughout the body of Christ.

~ Criss Jami

Her mind circled Georgia, circled Ebenezer. It called up images and memories and things nearly home but never that final destination itself, as if it existed at the center of her mind, shining like a sun too radiant. She knew there was a face at the center of that radiance. A face too bright. A face she sought and longed for but could no longer bear the light of. She drifted into sleep, circling, circling, circling.

~ A.s. Peterson

One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.

~ John O'donohue

The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.

~ Anthony De Sa

Rain, Aren’t you my soul’s joyful tearsonly longing for the sky to be happy?

~ Munia Khan

One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life’s burning question has been inscribed in one’s soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim’s soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine.

~ Michael Meade

Every touch of you on my skin has burnt and etched your name on my soul. Whenever I close my eyes and try to feel myself, all I can hear is constant echoes of your name in my head, and all I can feel is the constant longing for the darkness.

~ Akshay Vasu

The dead are immune from our prison of Time. The distance between the living and dead may be vast, but the space of Time the dead experience when they are reunited with their loved ones is only paper-thin.

~ Suzy Kassem

My mind is being consumed by you.My body is longing for you. Just one touch or a kiss, And I shall be satiated for a thousand years.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Thou I cannot so freely say, My heart is with thee, my soul longeth after thee ; yet can I say, I long for such a longing heart (648).

~ Richard Baxter

Just one caress became a symphony of passion, insatiable longing, an unquenchable desire to possess.... Gasps... The sparkling touch, embrace make hard to breathe... A mere short burst of brilliance, explosive need...forbidden sweet... Beneath the warmth of a dancing rainbow summer sunset, slowly tuning into the magic night with the stars flooding the sapphire skies...the sacred emerald island wildlife listens to our song, played with loving fingertips, reflected in diving deep into each other's ocean eyes...

~ Oksana Rus

I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her.

~ Jenim Dibie