#longing

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#infidelity #longing #touch #loyalty

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#attachment #belonging #home #homelessness #roots

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

#death #desire #expend #great #great hope

I realized that my truest passion was for helping people change through faith in a higher power. That meant, for me, belonging to the church. Using my abilities to bring Christian doctrine to a postmodern world. ↗

— James McGreevey

#bring #change #christian #church #doctrine

Before I took the veil, I was ornamented for the ceremony, and was clothed in a rich dress belonging to the Convent, which was used on such occasions; and placed not far from the altar in the chapel, in the view of a number of spectators who had assembled, perhaps about forty. ↗

— Maria Monk

#altar #assembled #before #belonging #ceremony

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs. ↗

— Richard Powers

#ever #grabs #live #others #racism

The lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, material barriers that, just because they are material, and not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing heart. ↗

— Josiah Royce

#because #between #cruel #facts #foes

Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion. ↗

— Tony Snow

#confusion #experiences #express #fear #generally

I think I had a shyness about me, I think I discovered acting as a way to break out of that and as a way of belonging, a sense of being special. ↗

— Michael C. Hall

#acting #being #belonging #break #discovered

My longing for truth was a single prayer. ↗

— Edith Stein

#prayer #single #truth