Quotes about longing

It doesn’t matter whether we consider ourselves "secular" or "religious": in some fundamental way, we're all reaching for the heavens.

We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we're really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we're forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn't eat life in order to survive.

The secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.

We listen to sad music for the same reason we go to church or synagogue or the mosque. We long for the Garden of Eden, we long for Mecca, we long for Zion because we come into this world with the sense that there is a more perfect and beautiful world to which we belong, where we are no longer.

He had remembered Vardy’s melancholy, the rage in him, and what Collingswood had once said. She was right. Vardy’s tragedy was that his faith had been defeated by the evidence, and he could not stop missing that faith. He was not a creationist, not any longer, not for years. And that was unbearable to him. He could only wish that his erstwhile wrongness had been right.

But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.

"You disappear so completely into your head sometimes. I wish I could follow you."

You do. You live in my head all the time.

I wondered if he ever thought of me, and hated the pang I felt when I told myself he didn't.

After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.

"Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars — points of light and reason. ...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything."

The greater the happiness that nature sets before me, the more I lament that he is not here to taste it: the greater the bliss we might enjoy together, the more I feel our present wretchedness apart.

The big reason why folks leave a small town," Rant use to say, "is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.