Wistfulness Quotes

• Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me."

  Nicole Krauss

  Stars, Night, Sky

  Nicole Krauss (2006). “The History of Love: A Novel”, p.116, W. W. Norton & Company

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

  Joseph O'Neill

  Serious, Logic, Realms

  10 Copy quote

• That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

  Dennis Potter

  Vision, Culture, Common

  15 Copy quote

• She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

  Lorrie Moore

  Loneliness, Littles, Crime

  Lorrie Moore (2010). “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore”, p.79, Faber & Faber

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little. I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin - a little fellow trying to do the best he could.

  Walt Disney

  Cute, Children, Animal

  "How to Be Like Walt : Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life". Book by Pat Williams, 2004.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.

  Victor Hugo

  Memories, Disappointment, Fire

  5 Copy quote