80 Quotes About Longing

In the intricate tapestry of human emotions, longing stands as a profoundly evocative thread. It whispers of dreams yet to be realized, places yet to be explored, and connections that transcend time and space. Whether it's the gentle ache for a distant loved one, the desire to return to a cherished memory, or the yearning for an uncharted future, longing resonates deeply within our hearts. In this spirit, we've gathered a remarkable collection of the top 80 quotes about longing, each capturing the essence of this timeless sentiment in its unique and poignant way. Let these words inspire and accompany you on your journey through the many shades of longing.

1. “You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow” - Amy Lowell

2. “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” - Herman Hesse

3. “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” - Augustine of Hippo

4. “Love Jo all your days, if you choose, but don't let it spoil you, for it's wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can't have the one you want.” - Louisa May Alcott

5. “Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.” - Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

6. “In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.” - Toni Morrison

7. “Dreadful will be the day when the world becomes contented, when one great universal satisfaction spreads itself over the world. Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is a child of God.” - Phillips Brooks

8. “The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.” - Anthony De Sa

9. “Min ene sko knirker af mangel på stjerneskud” - Benny Andersen

10. “My life is like an autumn leafI lie around unclaimed.The breeze blows me around,To be trampled under the feet of men.Natures cruel feast has bestowed me with pain,Pain of being a part,Just a part of someone.Pain of departing,Departing from that one.Pick me up like a rose,And hold me to your heart.Keep me there till he does not come.And when he comes do a good deed,Dig the earth below,And bury me deepFor I don't want to lie around,Unclaimed, unloved.” - Dr. Amit Abraham

11. “See how she leans her cheek upon her hand. O, that I were a glove upon that hand That I might touch that cheek!” - William Shakespeare

12. “I prayed for all his dreams to come true. I prayed that I would always be able to connect with him--even if I was no longer on earth.” - Alexandra Adornetto

13. “We look before and after,And pine for what is not;Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

14. “One spirit remained unaware of his presence, staring at Miss Parker with such longing that he reluctantly decided to let it stay. The spirit, a hollow-eyed girl with ringlets and clothing from long past, reached toward Percy, wishing to touch her. Alexi understood. When left to her own devices, Miss Parker was neither shy nor awkward; she was radiant.” - Leanna Renee Hieber

15. “I love the stillness of the wood; I love the music of the rill:I love the couch in pensive moodUpon some silent hill. Scarce heard, beneath yon arching trees, The silver-crested ripples pass; and, like a mimic brook, the breezeWhispers among the grass. Here from the world I win release, Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude, Break into mar the holy peace Of this great solitude. Here may the silent tears I weepLull the vested spirit into rest, As infants sob themselves to sleep Upon a mothers breast. But when the bitter hour is gone,And the keen throbbing pangs are still, Oh, sweetest then to couch aloneUpon some silent hill!To live in joys that once have been, To put the cold world out of sight,And deck life's drear and barren sceneWith hues of rainbow-light. For what to man the gift of breath, If sorrow be his lot below; If all the day that ends in deathBe dark with clouds of woe?Shall the poor transport of an hourRepay long years of sore distress—The fragrance of a lonely flower Make glad the wilderness? Ye golden house of life's young spring, Of innocence, of love and truth!Bright, beyond all imagining, Thou fairy-dream of youth!I'd give all wealth that years have piled, The slow result of Life's decay, To be once more a little childFor one bright summer's day.” - Lewis Carroll

16. “...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.” - Marisha Pessl

17. “…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.” - Homer

18. “There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.” - Khalil Gibran

19. “I love you, he thought, looking at Win. I love every part of you, every thought and word... the entire complex, fascinating bundle of all the things you are. I want you with ten different kinds of need at once. I love all the seasons of you, the way you are now, the thought of how much more beautiful you'll be in the decades to come. I love you for being the answer to every question my heart could ask.And it seemed so easy, once he capitulated. It seemed natural and right.Kev wasn't certain if he was surrendering to Win or to his own passion for her. Only that there was no more holding back. He would take her. And he would give her everything he had, every part of his soul, even the broken pieces.” - Lisa Kleypas

20. “There's nothing good about goodnight when it means goodbye.” - Jeff Thomas

21. “Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!” - Olive Higgins Prouty

22. “Never let the meaning of your love light escape to the dark nothingness of oblivion.” - Sorin Cerin

23. “To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!” - Virginia Woolf

24. “How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.” - Allegra Goodman

25. “We long for things that harm us and run from the things that grow and heal us. We think good is bad and bad is good.” - Tessa Afshar

26. “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

27. “Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding.” - Daphne du Maurier

28. “But no one can predict of a certainty what will happen. And none of it will change how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I will live it on my terms. And you... you can have all of me or nothing. I won't be an invalid any longer. Not even if it means losing you.” - Lisa Kleypas

29. “Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again.” - Stephen M. Irwin

30. “terucap rindu sepasang insan..geliat sang cinta di lubuk hati..terurai kata nan indah menawan..gundah pun sirna dibuai si mimpi.” - Toba Beta

31. “Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

32. “I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.” - Salvador Plascencia

33. “I missed the sound of her shuffling her homework while I listened to music on her bed. I missed the cold of her feet against my legs when she climbed into bed.I missed the shape of her shadow where it fell across the page of my book. I missed the smell of her hair and the sound of her breath and my Rilke on her nightstand and her wet towel thrown over the back of her desk chair. It felt like I should be sated after having a whole day with her, but it just made me miss her more.” - Maggie Stiefvater

34. “I couldn't take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real.” - Laura Whitcomb

35. “She'd been in love with the man, and love is a scary thing. If not reciprocated, it can turn a person into a monster.” - Michele Young-Stone

36. “...my body has becomeanother countryand I feel like an unemployedillegal alienhow will I survivewhere I do not belongI belong with you” - Patrick Califia-Rice

37. “I kept it to remind me that although there is evil, there is sometimes beauty and light. You, Jillian. You were always my light.” - Karen Marie Moning

38. “But she had dreamed of being his for too long. He had quite ruined her for a marriage of convenience. She wanted everything from him: his mind, his body, his name and, most of all, his heart.” - Sarah MacLean

39. “Erotic longing is really a longing to merge with something greater than oneself. For every kind of love is a force that holds the promise of taking us beyond the limitations of our individual lives.” - Julianne Davidow

40. “You can miss a person you've never known.” - Jodi Picoult

41. “The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another but they are so distant so very far apart that they cannot feel the warmth of each other even though they are made of burning.” - Beth Revis

42. “Until the longing came again, like the longing that you hear in the whistle of a train that is going far away. But the longing isn't really in the whistle, the longing is in you—for the wonder and the loveliness that is in the world, and everywhere.” - Meindert DeJong

43. “We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.” - Michael Ondaatje

44. “The very people you trusted most could become like strangers in their longing...” - Lynne Reid Banks

45. “It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.” - Samuel Beckett

46. “I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.” - Roger Zelazny

47. “Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!” - Héloïse

48. “For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous and that she should rest content with what she had, but she knew an emptiness deep inside her, which began to ache.” - Iain Pears

49. “Gavin, I can’t talk to you here. People will call me crazy." My imaginary friend smirked. "But you’re already talking to me." "Well, I have to stop." His smirk grew cocky. "I doubt you can resist." And he was right. There was nothing I wanted more than to give my full attention to an imagined shadow and ignore those who ignored me in the real world. I wanted to talk out loud to Gavin―to play and laugh boisterously with him. In a dream I could justify such behavior, but to succumb to hallucinations while wide awake would only prove me insane.” - Richelle Goodrich

50. “My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!And yet they seem alive and quiveringAgainst my tremulous hands which loose the stringAnd let them drop down on my knee to-night.This said, -- he wished to have me in his sightOnce, as a friend: this fixed a day in springTo come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,Yet I wept for it! -- this, ... the paper's light ...Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailedAs if God's future thundered on my past.This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paledWith lying at my heart that beat too fast.And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availedIf, what this said, I dared repeat at last!” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

51. “Själva längtan är beviset på att det vi längtar efter finns.” - Karen Blixen

52. “Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?” - Andre Gide

53. “A pine tree standeth lonelyIn the North on an upland bare;It standeth whitely shroudedWith snow, and sleepeth there.It dreameth of a Palm treeWhich far in the East alone,In the mournful silence standethOn its ridge of burning stone.” - Heinrich Heine

54. “The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.” - Steven L. Peck

55. “People often miss things that don't exist--miss things that were but are not anymore.” - Sarah McCoy

56. “I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.” - Orhan Pamuk

57. “Kavita’s arms are still outstretched, but they hold nothing. After the metal gate clangs shut behind them, Kavita can still hear Usha’s piercing wail echoing inside.” - shilpi somaya gowda

58. “I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.” - Jeanette Winterson

59. “Hunger of the heart is much stronger than hunger for food.” - Amanda Comer

60. “The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.” - Peter Høeg

61. “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

62. “Oh, I wish I lived in a caravan!’ said Jimmy longingly. ‘How lovely it must be to live in a house that has wheels and can go away down the lanes and through the towns, and stand still in fields at night!” - Enid Blyton

63. “My library is an archive of longings.” - Susan Sontag

64. “The Day is DoneThe day is done, and the darknessFalls from the wings of Night,As a feather is wafted downwardFrom an eagle in his flight.I see the lights of the villageGleam through the rain and the mist,And a feeling of sadness comes o'er meThat my soul cannot resist:A feeling of sadness and longing,That is not akin to pain,And resembles sorrow onlyAs the mist resembles the rain.Come, read to me some poem,Some simple and heartfelt lay,That shall soothe this restless feeling,And banish the thoughts of day.Not from the grand old masters,Not from the bards sublime,Whose distant footsteps echoThrough the corridors of Time.For, like strains of martial music,Their mighty thoughts suggestLife's endless toil and endeavor;And to-night I long for rest.Read from some humbler poet,Whose songs gushed from his heart,As showers from the clouds of summer,Or tears from the eyelids start;Who, through long days of labor,And nights devoid of ease,Still heard in his soul the musicOf wonderful melodies.Such songs have power to quietThe restless pulse of care,And come like the benedictionThat follows after prayer.Then read from the treasured volumeThe poem of thy choice,And lend to the rhyme of the poetThe beauty of thy voice.And the night shall be filled with music,And the cares, that infest the day,Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,And as silently steal away.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

65. “Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.” - John O'Donohue

66. “The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea people wherever they are-in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead center of a desert-and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed.” - Anuradha Roy

67. “Did you know, that one night; one moonless, clear, shining night; with the shadowy silhouettes of trees crisp against the star-filled sky – I, on the high, level terrace of my flat, stretched out my hand! Against all odds and possibilities of unbelief and grief – a life of searchings, discontent, and a nagging sense of unreality… A spider-web intuition of a spread-out, intricate illusion that wilfully withheld the truth from me.” - Radhika Mukherjee

68. “It isnt for wantof something to say--something to tell you--something you should know--but to detain you--keep you from going--feeling myself hereas long as you are--as long as you are” - Cid Corman

69. “Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.” - Susan Sontag

70. “Jack is somewhere in this city, right now. The thought was like passing by a house where someone was grilling in the back yard. You could smell it, but it wasn't yours, and you couldn't just barge into their home and demand a burger, no matter how your mouth watered.” - Jane Seville

71. “Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.” - Juliet Marillier

72. “For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.” - Michelle Latiolais

73. “Some part of me remembers what snow is, but this is the first time my new mind has seen it. It softens the crumbled sidewalks and turns rusty rooftops white. It’s beautiful. It crunches under my feet as I move toward the house, longing to understand.” - Isaac Marion

74. “It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.” - David Foster Wallace

75. “I call him my friend, but in the last year it's seemed too casual a word for what Gale is to me. A pang of longing shoots through my chest. If only he was with me now! But of course, I don't want that. I don't want him in the arena where he'd be dead in a few days. I just... I just miss him. And I hate being so alone. Does he miss me? He must.” - Suzanne Collins

76. “Desiderium sinus cordis” - St. Augustine of Hippo

77. “It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds - this, and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer deeply. Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

78. “My dear boy, looking like a thing has little to do with being a thing. Be the thing first, and you will grow to resemble it.” - Liam Perrin

79. “She had been his talisman, his cure for the insecurities and worries that he knew deep down didn't really matter, but somehow had always managed to get the best of him.” - Erik Tomblin

80. “البَابُ مَا قَرَعَتْهُ غَيْرُ الرِّيحِ في اللَّيْلِ العَمِيقْالبَابُ مَا قَرَعَتْهُ كَفُّكِ .أَيْنَ كَفُّكِ وَالطَّرِيقْنَاءٍ ؟ بِحَارٌ بَيْنَنَا ، مُدُنٌ ، صَحَارَى مِنْ ظَلاَمْالرِّيحُ تَحْمِلُ لِي صَدَى القُبْلاَتِ مِنْهَا كَالْحَرِيقْمِنْ نَخْلَةٍ يَعْدُو إِلَى أُخْرَى وَيَزْهُو في الغَمَامْ” - بدر شاكر السياب