longing

Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near...

The Ache That Would Not LeaveBehind the hum and routine of daily living, there lay a persistent and wild longing for something she could not easily put into words. It felt like impulsive adventures and watching the sun rise over unfamiliar mountains, or coffee in a street café, set to the background music of a foreign language. It was the smell of the ocean, with dizzying seagulls whirling in a cobalt sky; exotic foods and strange faces, in a city where no one knew her name. She wanted secrets whispered at midnight, and road trips without a map, but most of all, she ached for someone who desired to explore the mysteries that lay sleeping within her. The truly heartbreaking part was that she could feel the remaining days of her life falling away, like leaves from an autumn tree, but still this mysterious person who held the key to unlock her secrets did not arrive; they were missing, and she knew not where to find them.

One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.

I miss you.I miss you. I miss you, I miss you.Be ready, because when I see you, I'll never let you go again.

If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.

Life gives you what you are deeply longing for.

We can only come to terms with our own place in the world by compassionately commiserating with the pang of longing that our brethren experience.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

Jesus is the answer to the longing of every human heart. The love of his heart is the only love capable of filling our human longing__ecause it is human, yet infinite, and because it is also divine. Not only does each individual need and desire this love, but the world, taken as a whole, needs it.

She used to think that if she stole enough, the want would fade, the hunger would go away, but maybe it wasn__ that simple. Maybe it wasn__ a matter of what she didn__ have, of what she wasn__, but what she was.

I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.

Portland was a dream both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense, both tangible and not - a fleeting affair you want to hold on to but can't, so you try memorizing her every detail only to fail to do so in the consumption, in the savoring, in the absorbing of yourself into her. When she's gone, she comes to you in snippets, replaying in your mind like a fragmented picture show.

If we could imagine, while we live them, to what mundane moments nostalgia manages to stick itself...

I'd rather do something than read about it.""That's fine, but if you do it, and then can't think what it means, it's never much of a memory. Life has more to so with memories of the past and longings for the future than it ever does with *right now*."-pg 138-9

_"It always seemed somehow less real here... a really detailed dream, but sort of washed out, like a thin watercolor. Softer, somehow, even with their electric light and engines and everything. I guess it was because there was hardly any magic.

The only difference between you and a dream is I haven__ woken up with you

The person in love finds only a dream, a notion, an ideal. You fall in love with nothing but your own dreams__he only carriers of your true longings. Sometimes you manage to personify your dreams in another. Sometimes it__ not a single-player game. This doesn__ make love any less primal or selfish.

She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream...