#longing

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#craving #foreshadowing #lack #longing #loss

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

#longing #pain #regret #yearning #consciousness

There's so many different worlds, so many different suns. And we have just one world, but we live in different ones. ↗

— Mark Knopfler

#longing-for-peace #war #worlds #diversity

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#longing #weird

The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure. ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#sea #sea

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

#longing #mathematics #missing #negative-numbers #mathematics

We are homesick most for the places we have never known. ↗

— Carson McCullers

#nostalgia #nostalgia

When Summer lies upon the world, and in a noon of gold, Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold; When woodland halls are green and cool, and wind is in the West, Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best! ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#entwives #longing #loss #song #dreams

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

#after #capacity #chain #could #events

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

#bible #cling #closer #commentaries #contented