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"I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic."
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"These Moments Cascade Upon One Another"Here at shepherd's dusk, in a valley without echo, I listen for you. With a frayed longing, I hear your shadow voice whispering within me from far away. I grasp at what is left of this husky sun lying golden upon the upper meadows of lodge pole and bear grass. I gather the last remnants of the evening's breeze, so cool and lazy within my arms, feeling it curl up like a small and innocent kitten. And I see that behind a cloak of clouds, dalliance suits the canting moon. Suddenly I do not wish to lose another moment, And I covet all pristine light."

"Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be."

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

"Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable."

"Please wait for me. Don't have all the fun now. Don't fill up on other people who aren't me. Don't ruin your appetite."

"But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother,stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation.Not for your mouth, you who hold him now,did his lips ripen into these fervent contours.Do you really think your quiet footstepscould have so convulsed him, you who move like dawn wind?True, you startled his heart; but older terrorsrushed into him with that first jolt to his emotions.Call him . . . you'll never quite retrieve him from those dark consorts.Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved, he makes a homein your familiar heart, takes root there and begins himself anew.But did he ever begin himself?"

"He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn't work anymore. In fact, they'd never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world's more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked."

"Yet my longing for her was like a bad cold that had hung on for years despite my conviction that I was sure to get over it at any moment."
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"And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren't, and so anything-great and terrible-felt possible to me now."

"I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains-I'd mastered a thousand amazing physical feats-physically I'd become undeniably confident and capable-but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature."

"I had no evidence. No physical signs of my rape existed anymore. My body had already purged them. That was the irreversible reality."

"My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn't looked toward it. I wasn't lost. I'd always known the way. If I'd only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared."

"I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic."

"The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard."

"Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness."

"We aren't afraid of what we can explain. But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn't understand."
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