Longing Quotes

I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

William Butler Yeats
- Bird
- Rose
- Sorrow
O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.

William Butler Yeats
- Light
- Beloved
- Lays

September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black.

Catherynne M. Valente
- September
- Drank
- Way Up
But there are two kinds of escape. There is the escape from something, motivated by fear; and the escape to something, motivated by longing. To confuse the second with the first is to confuse strength with weakness, courage with cowardice, love with fear. “All life,” said the wise witch of Edmonton, “is a wandering to find home,” and nothing will ever finally extinguish this conviction of the human heart.

Alan McGlashan
- Fear
- Escape
- Longing
I--love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb-- Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb.

William Butler Yeats
- Mother
- Light
- Body
She knew that what she was going through was nothing special, just garden-variety heartbreak, the sort of thing that poets and novelists had been writing about for hundreds of years, but she also knew, from those same books, that there were people who never recover form it, ones who go on through life beset by a dim and painful longing.

Sarah Dunn
- People
- Writing
- Book
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

Gail Caldwell
The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.

William James