Longing Quotes

1. "While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "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."
Author: Alfred De Vigny

3. "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."
Author: Alva Myrdal

4. "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."
Author: Anne Lamott

5. "The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally."
Author: Anthony Minghella

6. "Character isn't something that magically appears simply by virtue of having a birthday and a describable physical identity; it is something that is built by action and error, out of anxiety and a longing that compels great efforts in the face of eternal hopelessness. A character in a story fights to get what s/he wants, just as the dramatic writer must fight to penetrate his or her own stubborn habits, prejudices and expectations, to get to the heart of the story. Drama builds character - that's why it exists, both inside and outside the screenplay."
Author: Billy Marshall Stoneking

7. "I don't have any huge desire to show you all that I'm not tough and strong, that I'm all feminine and soft. That's not a huge longing that I have because I know who I am."
Author: Carrie Anne Moss

8. "The Marquess shrugged. "I'm a shadow. I do know I am a shadow, Iago. I know most of the time. It's only when I cannot bear how everyone looks at me down here that I make myself forget it. Shadows are the other side of yourself. I had longings to be good, even then. I was just stronger than my wanting. I'm stronger than anything, really, when I want to be." The Marquess's hair turned white as the snow. "Do you know, we're right underneath Springtime Parish? This place is the opposite of springtime. Everything past prime, boarded up for the season. Just above us, the light shines golden on daffodils full of rainwine and heartgrass and a terrible, wicked, sad girl I can't get back to. I don't even know if I want to. Do I want to be her again? Or do I want to be free? I come here to think about that. To be near her and consider it. I think I shall never be free. I think I traded my freedom for a better story. It was a better story, even if the ending needed work."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

9. "Tea is the tast of my land:it is bitter and warm,strong,and sharp with memory.It tastes of longing.It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from.Also it vanishes-the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup.It disappears,like plantations stretching up into the mist.I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other.How sad that must make you-like children who long for absent mothers.I am sorry."
Author: Chris Cleave

10. "Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

11. "Livia dug around in the bottom of her closet while Blake put the figurine back where it belonged. He handled her belongings like he was the curator in a world-renowned museum."
Author: Debra Anastasia

12. "My longing for truth was a single prayer."
Author: Edith Stein

13. "Don't creationists ever wonder about the fact that the paleontologists found ape-like skulls with the 'human leg and foot bones,' rather than the other way around, i.e., human skulls with 'ape leg and foot bones?' . . . Come on, creationists, think about it! Did God hide the human skulls, only leaving behind leg and foot bones belonging to human midgets with misshapen feet, and mix such bones only with the skulls of ape-like creatures with larger cranial capacities than living apes? What a 'kidder' the creationists' God must be."
Author: Edward Babinski

14. "...at that time of all times for yearning and longing, just before the sharp senses lose their outlines in sleep."
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

15. "Longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness"
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

16. "Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home."
Author: Erwin Raphael McManus

17. "I sing your restless longing for the statue,your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.I sing the small sea siren who sings to you,riding her bicycle of corals and conches.But above all I sing a common thoughtthat joins us in the dark and golden hours.The light that blinds our eyes is not art.Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords."
Author: Federico García Lorca

18. "Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

19. "It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them."
Author: George Eliot

20. "Right now in this world, a child is dying from an ailment because its family cannot afford to buy charcoal for boiling water.Right now in this world, a girl is striving to find firewood from trees that no more exist, and water from sources that are poisonous.Right now in this world, a boy is out fishing in a lake rich with inedible species.Right now in this world, a mother is drowning in heavy rainfall, to save her belongings.Right now in this world, a man has lost his dignity because all his eff orts to save have been wiped away to poverty by unforeseen calamities.Right now in this world, a family is starving because drought has invaded their once fertile land.Right now in this world, a nation is planning for refugee status due to adverse climate conditions.Right now in this world, you have a choice to help alleviate environmental problems caused by humankind."
Author: Gloria D. Gonsalves

21. "Surely my lord will not hide his beautiful white legs!" exclaimed Infadoos regretfully. But Good persisted, and once only did the Kukuana people get the chance of seeing his beautiful legs again. Good is a very modest man. Henceforward they had to satisfy their aesthetic longings with his one whisker, his transparent eye, and his movable teeth."
Author: H. Rider Haggard

22. "Slim young women were swathed in chic black dresses, here to attend a ceremony in one of the hotel's many reception rooms. They wore small but expensive accessories, like vampire finches in search of blood, longing for a hint of light they could reflect."
Author: Haruki Murakami

23. "I love you, but I love the past even more. I long for it, I long for it, I am consumed with longing for it. The past! I shall cry, I shall suffer because the past will never come back again."
Author: Henri Barbusse

24. "Reality is perhaps not at all what I imagine. Perhaps it doesn't exist, in fact. Perhaps it only exists as a longing."
Author: Ingmar Bergman

25. "There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire"
Author: Jacqueline Carey

26. "They don't like the thought of someone else making demands on the person whom they see as belonging entirely to them."
Author: Jodi Picoult

27. "Work in classrooms isn't significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn't answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless."
Author: John Taylor Gatto

28. "The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light."
Author: Jon Krakauer

29. "He imagined her upstairs in her room, lying in bed with her hair spread across the pillow, that nightgown with the pearl buttons down the front tangled around her legs, nothing beneath the delicate fabric but her softness and warmth. Desire pulsed through his body, hungry and hot and needy.It was unbearable to want her with such intensity, unthinkable to need her with such desperate longing, dangerous to believe that she could somehow keep the demons away. He did not want to need her, for in need, there was dependence. He could not trust, for in trust, there was betrayal. Better never to see heaven at all than to catch a glimpse of it, grab for it, and lose it.He went to his room. He slept with his demons, and he woke alone."
Author: Laura Lee Guhrke

30. "Hannah." He looks at me, the same way he looked at me last night in the diner, with longing and sadness, and it's like everything I'm feeling I can see in his eyes. I want to kiss him so bad it hurts, but I know I can't. So instead, I tear my gaze from his and look down at the ground."
Author: Lauren Barnholdt

31. "Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable."
Author: Lauren Groff

32. "It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together—a longing which shall never perish from the earth, but shall have place in the heart of every wife that loves, until the end of time; and it shall be called by my name. But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I; for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me—life without him would not be life; how could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I shall be repeated."
Author: Mark Twain

33. "I know that suffering is one place where He ministers to us the most. So to think that we've had our quota would be foolish. I am just longing for the day when all the pain stops."
Author: Mary Beth Chapman

34. "The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted."
Author: Michel Onfray

35. "Happiness is the longing for repetition."
Author: Milan Kundera

36. "Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego."
Author: Neil DeGrasse Tyson

37. "Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?" asked Milo."Much worse," he said longingly. "But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context."
Author: Norton Juster

38. "But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging."
Author: Orson Scott Card

39. "He lay on top of me, buried deep, and fell asleep.He slept all night like that, and I did not move him, did not want to. I gasped breath in and out and closed my eyes and thought that I would never forget this feeling, of him on me and in me, of him consuming my soul and letting me go.He was too callous, too far gone to realize that I'd never be free of him, and all he'd really done was set me adrift.I never left that bed.That feeling of helpless abandonment and unendurable longing stayed inside of me, for hours, for minutes, for weeks.For years.I went through my life, through tragedy and pain, through hardship and life, and my heart, my very sould, stayed in that bed.I felt broken after that last encounter.Pieces of me had been shattered on that bed, important, essential pieces, and they would not, could not, ever find their way back together.But I kept going. Life is cruel like that."
Author: R.K. Lilley

40. "I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing."
Author: Richard Wagner

41. "Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.Jump into experience while you are alive!Think... and think... while you are alive.What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,do you thinkghosts will do it after?The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstaticjust because the body is rotten--that is all fantasy.What is found now is found then.If you find nothing now,you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity."
Author: Robert Bly

42. "After another moment of quietness, he asked, "Why did you do it?"Arobynn's attention drifted back to the wagon, already a small dot in the rolling foothills above Rifthold. "Because I don't like sharing my belongings," was his only response."
Author: Sarah J. Maas

43. "My library is an archive of longings."
Author: Susan Sontag

44. "Where the Flame was burningBy the long grey roadthere is ash after a fire gone outand signs of departurein dust and heat.That is all.But the flame that burnedin the circle of the travellerswhirled only before the eyein unextinguished longing.They were travelling for a dreamand could give all,and must go on in their searchingsand their unease,and the bonfire burned onin every edge of sight,whilst new searchers dug in the ashesand in the ground under the ashes,and it is dreamthat is happinessfor those journeying."
Author: Tarjei Vesaas

45. "Admit it," He insists. "I was right." "No." I sniff. "You were wrong." sniff. "I'm just crying"-sniff- "cause i'm so happy." My tear take that lie as their cue and start streaming down my cheeks. "Come on, Princess," he says, "You don't need to cry over that loser." This only makes me cry harder. We both know who the loser is in this scenario. With a muttered curse, Quince wraps his arms around me and squeezes. It feels remarkably like a hug. "Don't cry," he whispers in my ear. "Please." I don't know if it's his soft words or the fact that my face is now hidden by his broad chest, but i just let go. Three years of longing and loving from a distance have built to the breaking point, and i let it out all over his west coast choppers T-shirt. "shhh," He soothes. "He's not worth it."
Author: Tera Lynn Childs

46. "It took me till I was lying among the Rats and Vermin, upon the freezing edge of a Future invisible, to understand that my name had never been my own,— rather belonging, all this time, to the Authorities, who forbade me to change it, or withhold it, as 'twere a Ring upon the Collar of a Beast, ever waiting for the Lead to be fasten'd on. . . ."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

47. "All things belonging to the earth will never change-the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth-all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth-these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever."
Author: Thomas Wolfe

48. "In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams."
Author: Toni Morrison

49. "Cathy, don't look so defeated. She was only trying to put us downagain.Maybe nothing did work out right for her, but that doesn't mean we aredoomed. Let's go forth tomorrow with no great expectations of findingperfection. Then, expecting only a small share of happiness, we won'tbe disappointed."If a little hill of happiness would satisfy Chris, good for him. Butafter all these years of striving, hoping, dreaming, longing-I wanted amountain high! A hill wasn't enough. From this day forward, I vowedto myself, I was in control of my life. Not fate, notGod, not even Chris was ever again going to tell me what to do, ordominate me in any way. From this day forward, I was my own person, totake what I would, when I would, and I would answer only to myself. I'dbeen kept prisoner, held captive by greed. I'd been betrayed,deceived, tied to, used, poisoned ... but all that was over now."
Author: V.C. Andrews

50. "Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?"
Author: Zadie Smith

Longing Quotes Pictures