top of page
.png){kind=small}
"But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Longing quotes
"He reached out for her hand and she grabbed onto his. "Eena, when you're ready to talk about it, I'll be here. That's what best friends are for. She let the tears fall. He'd never know they were for him. He'd think they were because of Derian. They held hands silently throughout the night, Ian unaware that this was by far her most tortured nightmare ever. Paradise so close, and yet completely unattainable."
"Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable."
"But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get."
"I knew he wouldn't come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pass images of him to me of what he looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pass back images of my own, of a wolf on the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn't know how to begin to look."
"How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time..."
"Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too."
"Why does anything cling to something? Maybe they love wherever they're going so much that it's worth it. Maybe they'll keep coming back, until there's only one star left. Maybe that one star will make the trip forever, out of the hope that someday-if it keeps coming back often enough-another star will find it again."
Explore more quotes by George Eliot
"He was unique to her among men because he's impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who's nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man."
"Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear."
"In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception."
"And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment."
"A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other."
"Life is measured by the rapidity of change the succession of influences that modify the being."
"The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it oftensubsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent."
"I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight-that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin."
"What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self."
bottom of page