“Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.”— Anne Sexton, goodreads.com
“I had two longings and one was fighting the other. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”— Jean Rhys, amazon.com
“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”— Carson McCullers, amazon.com
“Even if I now saw you only once, I would long for you through worlds, worlds, worlds.”— Izumi Shikibu, amazon.com
“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”— Carson McCullers, amazon.com
“I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch. The time I annihilated while I waited like a man doing a life sentence. I need you like life needs life. I want you bad like a…”— Henry Rollins, amazon.com
“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, me…”— Vladimir Nabokov, thereviewreview.net
“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com
“Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”— Susan Sontag, amazon.com
“There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.”— Jim Butcher, amazon.com
“You were young, And you were searching, even then. But you were trying to make homes out of temporary people. Trying to find yourself in the body of a stranger who could never fill you, never complete you, never satisfy the longing in your chest to be both protected and set free, both loved and let…”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“Long and liquid words like wounds reopening, spilling blood across the surface of each page. I wrote every secret, every hope, every wish, confessing how my lips still long to be kissed by yours.”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“I can close my eyes and still remember the way the earth smelled like gravel and sunburnt skin, the cheap gas-station vodka burning my throat, a boy’s hand on the small of my back, the black, black sky watching my every move.”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“Whenever I was dizzy and drunk on freedom and loneliness I would look up to right myself again. And the sky, those roads, these stars would guide my tired heart home.”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“I tried to kiss away the emptiness screaming ‘I love you’ into the spaces as if I could fill him, us. He was my first experience with transience— searching for a residence in the impermanent.”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“He kissed me, and I thought of all the names of the constellations, all the patterns I had yet to trace, all the world I had yet to feel underneath my feet.”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“The roads called at night, always long and lonesome and winding. She always drove with one hand on the wheel, the windows rolled down, the gas pressed just a little too far. This was her way of running when her legs couldn’t carry her fast enough.”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“You and I were never meant to last too many elbows, too much skin two bodies intertwined in beds but never dreams.”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc
“The highway slipped past our quiet tires, streetlights specks in the distance. I lost all sense of time, out of place from my suburban town, seeking solace in our silence. As we drove on, I watched the stars their quiet elegance magical, twinkling, unafraid. And on that unfamiliar highway I didn’t f…”— Marisa Donnelly, tcat.tc