“Spiritual yearning is the homesickness of the soul.”

“Gnostic tales tell of the homesickness of the soul, its yearning for its own milieu…”

“What the soul hardly realizes is that, unbeliever or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.”

“...if something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feelings of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.”

“The soul hardly ever realizes it, but whether he is a believer or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.”

“But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?”