Longing Quotes - Page 30

• My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like - but truer than the literal truth.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Truth, Lying, Reality

  Rosemary Treble, Vincent van Gogh (1975). “Van Gogh and his art”

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• Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.

  Frank Herbert

  Opposites

  Frank Herbert (1987). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, p.393, Penguin

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• There is "a mental fatigue which is a spurious kind of remorse, and has all the anguish of the nobler feeling. It is an utter weariness and prostration of spirit, a sickness of heart and mind, a bitter longing to lie down and die.

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Lying, Heart, Feelings

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1872). “Charlotte's Inheritance: A Novel”, p.68

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• I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?

  Alfred Stieglitz

  Lonely, Art, New York

  Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothy Norman (1976). “Alfred Stieglitz”

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• Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable.

  Lawren Harris

  Desire, Plastic, Results

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• Longing is like a seed that wrestles in the ground

  Emily Dickinson

  Seeds

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• Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?

  Li-Young Lee

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• What a rare joy it is to linger in the lucid, transcendent worlds of Jennifer Maier's poems. In taut, precise language and lapidary images, Now, Now explores myriad pathways of connection, the ways desire, longing, and imaginative possibility brush up against the everyday, revealing a keen, fiercely compassionate intelligence-a sensibility so finely attuned and so clearly in love with the world that you would follow it almost anywhere.

  Rick Hilles

  Joy, Everyday, Desire

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• Envy is a sign of insecurity, yes; but so is longing to be envied.

  Criss Jami

  Envy, Insecurity, Envied

  Criss Jami (2016). “Healology”, p.33, Criss Jami

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• I still believe that many Americans have a deep longing for that glorious moment when a sermon is more Biblical than American.

  Criss Jami

  Believe, Biblical, Moments

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.34, Criss Jami

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• I have always at least, ever since I can remember had a kind of longing for death.

  C. S. Lewis

  Kind, Remember, I Can

  C. S. Lewis (1980). “Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold”, p.80, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Fain would I wed a fair young man that night and day could please me, When my mind or body grieved that had the power to ease me. Maids are full of longing thoughtsthat breed a bloodless sickness, And that, oft I hear men say, is only cured by quickness.

  Thomas Campion

  Night, Men, Please Me

  1617 Fourth Book of Airs,'Fain Would I Wed'.

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• The human soul is like a bird that is born in a cage. Nothing can deprive it of its natural longings, or obliterate the mysterious remembrance of its heritage.

  Epes Sargent

  Bird, Remembrance, Soul

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 558, 1895.

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• The song of your soul is longing to be sung. Let your own essence express itself freely.

  Brandon Bays

  Song, Essence, Soul

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• All beautiful things bring sadness, nor alone Sweet music, as our wisest Poet spake, Because in us keen longings they awake.

  Richard Chenevix Trench

  Beauty, Beautiful, Sweet

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• La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe"  le   o  u' nous battons des me  lodies a'   faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e  toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Stars, Moving, Speech

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• What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts indeed, sometimes from no facts in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Interesting, Facts, Becoming

  Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter (2010). “The Light of Other Days”, p.206, Macmillan

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• I've written a number of songs over the years and it's a big part of my life, this sort of tension between a longing for home and the call for the open road. It's sort of like a tug between two families. I even love to miss my home.

  James Taylor

  Song, Home, Two

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I discovered that our clan included loads of cousins and uncles and aunts and animals of every shape. I was taught that chaos and competition were family values. And I learned that we all loved the sea. Somehow, the sea was about us-our past, our exuberance, our frailty, our longing.

  Timothy Shriver

  Cousin, Uncles, Past

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• Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.

  George Eliot

  Men, Vegetables, Desire

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner, and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.168

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• When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Men, Secret

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2013). “Delphi Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Illustrated)”, p.3576, Delphi Classics

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• The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

  Allan Bloom

  Views, Safety, Risk

  "Love and Friendship". Book by Allan Bloom, pp. 13-14, 1993.

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• A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.

  Allan Bloom

  Beautiful, Sacrifice, Egalitarianism

  Allan David Bloom (1993). “Love and Friendship”

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• Longing alone is singer to the lute.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Singers

  Edna St. Vincent Millay (2014). “Millay: Poems”, p.156, Everyman's Library

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• The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings. Where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.

  John Cheever

  Struggle, Men, Records

  National Book Award, September 1958.

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