Longing Quotes

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

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

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

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

~ Kara Martinelli

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

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

~ Milan Kundera

I have this insane and unabated longing for San Francisco. I come up there every chance that I get.

~ Aisha Tyler

My longing for truth was a single prayer.

~ Edith Stein