I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.
- Shmuel Y Agnon
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.
- Hermann Hesse
In all my longing for a family and a home, I'd never quite been able to decide what they should have looked like. But this house looks and feels so right, so perfect, it seems impossible any other place would suit me half so well.
- Lisa Kleypas
And that's what we're truly longing for. On those weekends when we're suddenly gripped with the urge to watch all three extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, what we really want, deep down inside (besides therapy), is the assurance that there is a realm someplace where evil has been conquered once and for all.
- Sarah Arthur
On Earth, we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed; and that, if it had existed, could never exist again...on the Moon, there is no past to long for or dream about. There is no direction but forward.
- Isaac Asimov
Woe entreats: Go! Away, woe! But all that suffers wants to live, that it may become ripe and joyous and longing- longing for what is farther, higher, brighter. "I want heirs"- thus speaks all that suffers; "I want children; I do not want myself".
Joy, however, does not want heirs, or children- joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
- Annie Barrows
Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
- Mary Ann Shaffer
I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
- Albert Camus
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
- Saul Bellow
But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.
- Elizabeth Berg
... Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.
- Thomas Bernhard
People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.
- Bodhidharma
If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion
- Boethius
Good writers don't moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful, and that is why you must write with Christ at the center of your reason for writing. That does not mean that every book must be a retelling of Luke's gospel, however, every worthy book written by a Christian will direct readers away from self, and sin, and put them on a quest for God and his gospel. Create longing for these things.
- Douglas Bond
There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
- Alain De Botton
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
- Alain De Botton
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
- Madeleine L Engle
Beneath the skin, there is fear. Pain. Remorse. Yearning. Desire. A fierce longing for power. All of this. We are joined. It is as if we live in the center of a great storm. Around us the world of the relams revolves like a giant kaeidoscope, images refracted again and again. So many worlds! So much to know.
- Libba Bray
They walked to school, talking about how much they were longing for the summer holidays.
"Oh, I am planning things," said Jamie. "Great, great things. I could join a band."
"You gave up the guitar after two lessons."
"Well," he said, "I could be a backup dancer."
"Backup dancers have to wear belly shirts and glitter," said Mae. "So obviously, I support this plan.
- Sarah Rees Brennan
Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.
- Frederick Buechner
There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.
- Coco Chanel
There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.
- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
- Bertrand Russell
I've been longing for,
Daisies to push through the floor,
And I wish that plant life would grow all around me,
So I won't feel dead anymore.
- Owl City
Of all the passions that inspire a man in a battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honor and reknown.
- Karl Von Clausewitz
My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name.
- Leonard Cohen
But I still has enough longing for that concept that I didn't want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soul mate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.
- David Levithan
You can lose people without them dying, and I have, from moving, from traveling. The emotion is real, it just doesn't actually have to do with death. I'm singing about what I know, and it's a song about longing for somebody who's disappeared in your life.
- Jon Crosby
'Free' is more of that 'familiarity breeds contempt' kind of thing. It's about saying 'Wait, I'm longing for something more than I have and I don't know what it is that I want, but I know I want it.' It has nothing to do with what I'm going through, personally.
- Jon Crosby
I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way.
- Jack Dee
extremes mean borders beyond which life ends...and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death.
- Milan Kundera
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
- Milan Kundera
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
- Milan Kundera
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
- Milan Kundera
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
- Milan Kundera
Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
- Milan Kundera
Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.
- Isadora Duncan
The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.
- Helen Dunmore
Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.
- Andrea Dworkin
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
- Carson Mccullers
He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.
- Jonathan Franzen
Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.
- Cornelia Funke
A longing for books [is] nothing compared with what you [can] feel for human beings. The books [tell] you about that feeling. The books [speak] of love, and it [is] wonderful to listen to them, but they [are] no substitute for love itself.
- Cornelia Funke
And when you were a silent word upon Life's quivering lips, I too was there, another silent word. Then life uttered us and we came down the years throbbing with memories of yesterday and with longing for tomorrow, for yesterday was death conquered and tomorrow was birth pursued.
- Kahlil Gibran
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
- Kahlil Gibran
Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?
- Greta Garbo
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
- Khalil Gibran
She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.
- Anna Godbersen
The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.
- Gail Godwin
Having been born and raised in 'The Sportsman's Paradise', I had an instant longing for Daddy. When I was hurt as a little girl, I would curl up in his lap and he would rock me. Figuratively knocking me to my knees, I suddenly - fiercely - wanted Daddy to hold my hand and assure me I was going to get through this. Seeing Dr. England's clenched jaw and look of sympathy and knowing Daddy's reaction would have been similar did little to help the ache. - Allison La Crosse
- T R Graves
Hearing a crow with no mouth
Cry in the deep
Darkness of the night,
I feel a longing for
My father before he was born.
- Ikkyu
Sometimes we let our thoughts of tomorrow take up too much of today. Daydreaming of the past and longing for the future may provide comfort but will not take the place of living in the present. This is the day of our opportunity, and we must grasp it
- Thomas S Monson
My longing for someone to talk to made Himillsy the lightning bug in my honey jar. I punched holes in the lid so she could breathe.
- Chip Kidd
I'm so fascinated by the human longing for meaning. The way we relate romantically to each other is so much to do with our longing for meaning as well.
- Kimbra
That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
- Ben Kingsley
Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
- Barbara Kingsolver
In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
- Tony Kushner
Age has given me the gift of me, it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I've already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant tender-hearted wife to myself.
- Anne Lamott
Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth-for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice-awoke in him.
- C S Lewis
In the Author's mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariable begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: a verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author's impulse complete. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said)
- C S Lewis
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was longing... For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
- C S Lewis
I have nearly finished 'The Morte D'Arthur'....The book itself is a glorious feast: I don't know how to explain its particular charm, because it is not like anything I ever read before: and yet in places like all of them... I am just longing for Saturday when I can plunge into it again.
- C S Lewis
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
- C S Lewis
Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.
- Laura Lippman
Saturday 12 July 1823 [Halifax]
Could not sleep last night. Dozing, hot & disturbed... a violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before... It was absolute pain to me.
- Anne Lister
All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well...desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame-will make you happy is to decieve oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152
- Brennan Manning
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
- Edgar Lee Masters
Death is the great hope of all life; the desire to expend itself; to be used and consumed by its own longing for itself.
- Bryant H Mcgill
[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.
- Robin Mckinley
Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.
- Steven Millhauser
We had no longing for excessive wealth: a mere competency, though earned by daily toll, so that it was reasonably sure, and free from the drag of continued indebtedness to others, was all we coveted.
- Edmund Morris
Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.
- Kate Morton
The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.
- Alva Myrdal
There is a third dimension to traveling, the longing for what is beyond.
- Jan Myrdal
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
- Vladimir Nabokov
I'm doing lots of interviews and stuff. I'm longing for the days of getting up, not having to put on makeup and do my hair and just going to the studio.
- Stevie Nicks
The way of the nomad is to accept everything as it comes: there is no anticipation of better days, no longing for the unrequited, no despair for loss.
- D J Niko
The century's greatest detective, advertised as solving every case imaginable. How great his burden must be, how much pain must he go through every single moment: past, present, and future... A burden so great it would leave you hunched over. A bitter taste in your mouth that would leave you longing for sweets.
-M
- Nisio Isin
I would be in Italy working on a film, longing for something simple - like, God, I would just kill to be sitting at a barbecue having a beer right now.
- Chris Odonnell
The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
Indy, I have lots of great memories from there, and probably the part of me that doesn't feel quite as longing for it is that there is still a chance that I could do it again. It's not gone.
- Danica Patrick
When you are not missing something, longing for something, you don't really think about it that much. It's like that girlfriend you don't want to have anymore. You don't think about her anymore. Or ex-husband. You just don't.
- Danica Patrick
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
- Fernando Pessoa
The feelings that hurt most, the motions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
- Fernando Pessoa
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!
- Fernando Pessoa
Longing for you is the sweetest anticipation I've ever known.
- Cari Quinn
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
- Ayn Rand
But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.
- Ayn Rand
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
- Ayn Rand
It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own.
- Ayn Rand
She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
- Jean Rhys
I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
- Jean Rhys
Tired of myself longing for what I have not
- Samuel Richardson
I thought it was just a longing for you, and that would be enough for both of us. I do long for you, but it's not enough and it's not all. Oh, this is where I want t be.
- Nora Roberts
So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.
- Theodore Roethke
he had never felt this type of heat and longing for another person. He didn't know how Zane did it, but Ty knew that there would never be anyone else for him. He wanted Zane to feel that too, to have that assurance both physically and emotionally. He would do whatever he had to make sure Zane knew he was his
- Abigail Roux
Your longing for ME is my message to you,
All your attempts to reach ME,
Are in reality MY attempts to reach you.
- Rumi
...I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.
- Mary Doria Russell
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
- George Santayana
You came and I was longing for you.
You cooled a heart that burned with desire.
- Sappho
What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.
- Lisa See
I was longing for the moment I was in, even as I was in it.
- Dani Shapiro
Even the pyramids might one day disappear, but not the Palestinians longing for their homeland.
- Eduard Shevardnadze
I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretence that things are real, due to one's longing for them.
- Dodie Smith
A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard's twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this where one is so horribly misunderstood that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse.
- Zadie Smith
My longing for truth was a single prayer.
- Edith Stein
Left wing...Right wing...it's so limited; why doesn't it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone?
- Jan Struther
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
- Donna Tartt
People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.
- Polly Toynbee
We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross
- Paul Tournier
Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.
- Jane Urquhart
The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know--and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover.
- Catherynne M Valente
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.
- Alfred De Vigny
I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity.
- Angel Wagenstein
And so much of my life has been about returning home and longing for home, wanting my children to know about my roots. And I thought I can't be the only one to feel this way so I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore.
- Sela Ward
Kamil thinks to himself that these are eyes that see everything, ravenous eyes. He feels a pang of longing for the omnivorous freedom of a child's appetite for life, not yet disciplined to distinguish raw from cooked, feasting without caring whether life is served at a table or from a tray on the floor.
- Jenny White
The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or sweetness.
- Marion Woodman
God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, the world's true Lord.
- N T Wright
nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for
Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.
Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one's home universe, or as a longing for versions of one's self that one will never, and can never know.
- Charles Yu
- Shmuel Y Agnon
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life.
- Hermann Hesse
In all my longing for a family and a home, I'd never quite been able to decide what they should have looked like. But this house looks and feels so right, so perfect, it seems impossible any other place would suit me half so well.
- Lisa Kleypas
And that's what we're truly longing for. On those weekends when we're suddenly gripped with the urge to watch all three extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, what we really want, deep down inside (besides therapy), is the assurance that there is a realm someplace where evil has been conquered once and for all.
- Sarah Arthur
On Earth, we are unmanned by our longing for a pastoral past that never really existed; and that, if it had existed, could never exist again...on the Moon, there is no past to long for or dream about. There is no direction but forward.
- Isaac Asimov
Woe entreats: Go! Away, woe! But all that suffers wants to live, that it may become ripe and joyous and longing- longing for what is farther, higher, brighter. "I want heirs"- thus speaks all that suffers; "I want children; I do not want myself".
Joy, however, does not want heirs, or children- joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
- Annie Barrows
Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.
- Mary Ann Shaffer
I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
- Albert Camus
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
- Saul Bellow
But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.
- Elizabeth Berg
... Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.
- Thomas Bernhard
People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.
- Bodhidharma
If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion
- Boethius
Good writers don't moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful, and that is why you must write with Christ at the center of your reason for writing. That does not mean that every book must be a retelling of Luke's gospel, however, every worthy book written by a Christian will direct readers away from self, and sin, and put them on a quest for God and his gospel. Create longing for these things.
- Douglas Bond
There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
- Alain De Botton
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
- Alain De Botton
We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
- Madeleine L Engle
Beneath the skin, there is fear. Pain. Remorse. Yearning. Desire. A fierce longing for power. All of this. We are joined. It is as if we live in the center of a great storm. Around us the world of the relams revolves like a giant kaeidoscope, images refracted again and again. So many worlds! So much to know.
- Libba Bray
They walked to school, talking about how much they were longing for the summer holidays.
"Oh, I am planning things," said Jamie. "Great, great things. I could join a band."
"You gave up the guitar after two lessons."
"Well," he said, "I could be a backup dancer."
"Backup dancers have to wear belly shirts and glitter," said Mae. "So obviously, I support this plan.
- Sarah Rees Brennan
Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.
- Frederick Buechner
There is no past we can bring back by longing for it. There is only an eternal now that builds and creates out of the past something new and better.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.
- Coco Chanel
There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.
- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
- Bertrand Russell
I've been longing for,
Daisies to push through the floor,
And I wish that plant life would grow all around me,
So I won't feel dead anymore.
- Owl City
Of all the passions that inspire a man in a battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honor and reknown.
- Karl Von Clausewitz
My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name.
- Leonard Cohen
But I still has enough longing for that concept that I didn't want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soul mate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.
- David Levithan
You can lose people without them dying, and I have, from moving, from traveling. The emotion is real, it just doesn't actually have to do with death. I'm singing about what I know, and it's a song about longing for somebody who's disappeared in your life.
- Jon Crosby
'Free' is more of that 'familiarity breeds contempt' kind of thing. It's about saying 'Wait, I'm longing for something more than I have and I don't know what it is that I want, but I know I want it.' It has nothing to do with what I'm going through, personally.
- Jon Crosby
I had a longing for ritual, something I could cling to, a routine to make me feel well and contented. I hoped that reading Bible commentaries and theological critiques would nudge me closer to some kind of absolute that I could hold up as a torch to light my way.
- Jack Dee
extremes mean borders beyond which life ends...and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death.
- Milan Kundera
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
- Milan Kundera
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
- Milan Kundera
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
- Milan Kundera
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
- Milan Kundera
Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
- Milan Kundera
Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.
- Isadora Duncan
The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.
- Helen Dunmore
Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.
- Andrea Dworkin
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
- Carson Mccullers
He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.
- Jonathan Franzen
Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.
- Cornelia Funke
A longing for books [is] nothing compared with what you [can] feel for human beings. The books [tell] you about that feeling. The books [speak] of love, and it [is] wonderful to listen to them, but they [are] no substitute for love itself.
- Cornelia Funke
And when you were a silent word upon Life's quivering lips, I too was there, another silent word. Then life uttered us and we came down the years throbbing with memories of yesterday and with longing for tomorrow, for yesterday was death conquered and tomorrow was birth pursued.
- Kahlil Gibran
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
- Kahlil Gibran
Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?
- Greta Garbo
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
- Khalil Gibran
She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.
- Anna Godbersen
The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.
- Gail Godwin
Having been born and raised in 'The Sportsman's Paradise', I had an instant longing for Daddy. When I was hurt as a little girl, I would curl up in his lap and he would rock me. Figuratively knocking me to my knees, I suddenly - fiercely - wanted Daddy to hold my hand and assure me I was going to get through this. Seeing Dr. England's clenched jaw and look of sympathy and knowing Daddy's reaction would have been similar did little to help the ache. - Allison La Crosse
- T R Graves
Hearing a crow with no mouth
Cry in the deep
Darkness of the night,
I feel a longing for
My father before he was born.
- Ikkyu
Sometimes we let our thoughts of tomorrow take up too much of today. Daydreaming of the past and longing for the future may provide comfort but will not take the place of living in the present. This is the day of our opportunity, and we must grasp it
- Thomas S Monson
My longing for someone to talk to made Himillsy the lightning bug in my honey jar. I punched holes in the lid so she could breathe.
- Chip Kidd
I'm so fascinated by the human longing for meaning. The way we relate romantically to each other is so much to do with our longing for meaning as well.
- Kimbra
That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
- Ben Kingsley
Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
- Barbara Kingsolver
In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
- Tony Kushner
Age has given me the gift of me, it just gave me what I was always longing for, which was to get to be the woman I've already dreamt of being. Which is somebody who can do rest and do hard work and be a really constant companion, a constant tender-hearted wife to myself.
- Anne Lamott
Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth-for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice-awoke in him.
- C S Lewis
In the Author's mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariable begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: a verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author's impulse complete. (from the essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said)
- C S Lewis
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through was longing... For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
- C S Lewis
I have nearly finished 'The Morte D'Arthur'....The book itself is a glorious feast: I don't know how to explain its particular charm, because it is not like anything I ever read before: and yet in places like all of them... I am just longing for Saturday when I can plunge into it again.
- C S Lewis
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
- C S Lewis
Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.
- Laura Lippman
Saturday 12 July 1823 [Halifax]
Could not sleep last night. Dozing, hot & disturbed... a violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before... It was absolute pain to me.
- Anne Lister
All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well...desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame-will make you happy is to decieve oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj
The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152
- Brennan Manning
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
- Edgar Lee Masters
Death is the great hope of all life; the desire to expend itself; to be used and consumed by its own longing for itself.
- Bryant H Mcgill
[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.
- Robin Mckinley
Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.
- Steven Millhauser
We had no longing for excessive wealth: a mere competency, though earned by daily toll, so that it was reasonably sure, and free from the drag of continued indebtedness to others, was all we coveted.
- Edmund Morris
Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.
- Kate Morton
The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.
- Alva Myrdal
There is a third dimension to traveling, the longing for what is beyond.
- Jan Myrdal
Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.
- Vladimir Nabokov
I'm doing lots of interviews and stuff. I'm longing for the days of getting up, not having to put on makeup and do my hair and just going to the studio.
- Stevie Nicks
The way of the nomad is to accept everything as it comes: there is no anticipation of better days, no longing for the unrequited, no despair for loss.
- D J Niko
The century's greatest detective, advertised as solving every case imaginable. How great his burden must be, how much pain must he go through every single moment: past, present, and future... A burden so great it would leave you hunched over. A bitter taste in your mouth that would leave you longing for sweets.
-M
- Nisio Isin
I would be in Italy working on a film, longing for something simple - like, God, I would just kill to be sitting at a barbecue having a beer right now.
- Chris Odonnell
The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
Indy, I have lots of great memories from there, and probably the part of me that doesn't feel quite as longing for it is that there is still a chance that I could do it again. It's not gone.
- Danica Patrick
When you are not missing something, longing for something, you don't really think about it that much. It's like that girlfriend you don't want to have anymore. You don't think about her anymore. Or ex-husband. You just don't.
- Danica Patrick
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
- Fernando Pessoa
The feelings that hurt most, the motions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
- Fernando Pessoa
Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!
- Fernando Pessoa
Longing for you is the sweetest anticipation I've ever known.
- Cari Quinn
I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.
- Ayn Rand
But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.
- Ayn Rand
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
- Ayn Rand
It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own.
- Ayn Rand
She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
- Jean Rhys
I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
- Jean Rhys
Tired of myself longing for what I have not
- Samuel Richardson
I thought it was just a longing for you, and that would be enough for both of us. I do long for you, but it's not enough and it's not all. Oh, this is where I want t be.
- Nora Roberts
So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying,
An intolerable waiting,
A longing for another place and time,
Another condition.
- Theodore Roethke
he had never felt this type of heat and longing for another person. He didn't know how Zane did it, but Ty knew that there would never be anyone else for him. He wanted Zane to feel that too, to have that assurance both physically and emotionally. He would do whatever he had to make sure Zane knew he was his
- Abigail Roux
Your longing for ME is my message to you,
All your attempts to reach ME,
Are in reality MY attempts to reach you.
- Rumi
...I begin with songs. They provide a sort of skeleton grammar for me to flesh out. Songs of longing for future tense, songs of regret for past tense, and songs of love for present tense.
- Mary Doria Russell
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
- George Santayana
You came and I was longing for you.
You cooled a heart that burned with desire.
- Sappho
What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.
- Lisa See
I was longing for the moment I was in, even as I was in it.
- Dani Shapiro
Even the pyramids might one day disappear, but not the Palestinians longing for their homeland.
- Eduard Shevardnadze
I suddenly knew that religion, God - something beyond everyday life - was there to be found, provided one is really willing. And I saw that though what I felt in the church was only imagination, it was a step on the way; because imagination itself can be a kind of willingness - a pretence that things are real, due to one's longing for them.
- Dodie Smith
A minute later, the young Turk and Howard parted on frosty terms, not much warmed by Howard's twenty-pence tip, the only extra change he had in his pocket. It is on journeys like this where one is so horribly misunderstood that you find yourself longing for home, that place where you are entirely understood, for better or for worse.
- Zadie Smith
My longing for truth was a single prayer.
- Edith Stein
Left wing...Right wing...it's so limited; why doesn't it ever occur to any of them that what one is really longing for is the wishbone?
- Jan Struther
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
- Donna Tartt
People want the right to die at a time of their own choosing. Too many families have watched helplessly as a relative dies slowly, longing for death.
- Polly Toynbee
We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross
- Paul Tournier
Longing for something that you once had is a mistake because the pictures in your mind are never the same as whatever it is you are longing for.
- Jane Urquhart
The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know--and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover.
- Catherynne M Valente
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.
- Alfred De Vigny
I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity.
- Angel Wagenstein
And so much of my life has been about returning home and longing for home, wanting my children to know about my roots. And I thought I can't be the only one to feel this way so I thought it would be an interesting topic to explore.
- Sela Ward
Kamil thinks to himself that these are eyes that see everything, ravenous eyes. He feels a pang of longing for the omnivorous freedom of a child's appetite for life, not yet disciplined to distinguish raw from cooked, feasting without caring whether life is served at a table or from a tray on the floor.
- Jenny White
The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or sweetness.
- Marion Woodman
God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, the world's true Lord.
- N T Wright
nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for
Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.
Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one's home universe, or as a longing for versions of one's self that one will never, and can never know.
- Charles Yu
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