#longing

"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."

"If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it."

"The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair."

"..he wanted her.And at another time, as another man, he would have her. Without hesitation. As lover. . . as more."

"I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you."

"But no one can predict of a certainty what will happen. And none of it will change how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I will live it on my terms. And you... you can have all of me or nothing. I won't be an invalid any longer. Not even if it means losing you."

"Even her name seemed empty, as though it had detached itself from her and was floating untethered in his mind. How am I supposed to live without you? It was not a matter of the body; his body would carry on as usual. The problem was located in the word how: he would live, but without Elspeth the flavour, the manner, the method of living were lost to him. He would have to relearn solitude."

"…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad."

"I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love."

"It’s better if you don’t come at all, then come and act like you don’t want to be here. The same applies to there, when I’m there, which is also confusingly here, though it’s not here it’s there."

"We all long for something. Midgets long to be long, but I long to belong."

"Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee."

"The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness."

"If you were mine, I'd never leave you, Prudence. I couldn't."

"Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury."

"You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow"

"Wanting him to come back before anyone notices part of the world has not moved since he left."

"There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you."