"They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now"
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."
— C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold)

"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)

"Dorian used to watch you like a starving man who wants meat. Now he looks at you like he wants seconds."
— Richelle Mead

"Love Jo all your days, if you choose, but don't let it spoil you, for it's wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can't have the one you want. (Amy March to Teddy Lawrence)"
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals."
— Salvador Plascencia (The People of Paper)

"Wanting him to come back before anyone notices part of the world has not moved since he left."
— Brian Andreas

"If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it."
— Robert Goolrick (The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life)

"...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles."
— Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics)

""I couldn't take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real.""
— Laura Whitcomb (A Certain Slant of Light)

"And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart—knowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. "
— J.L. Carr (A Month in the Country)

""I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in teh meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.""
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"Now Doon seemed to care for his new friends more than he did for her. Every time she thought about him she felt a thud of pain, like a bruised place inside her. --People of Sparks--"
— Jeanne DuPrau

"Witch Baby wanted to ask Ping how to find her Jah-Love angel. She knew Raphael was not him, even though Raphael had the right eyes and smile and name. She knew how he looked--the angel in her dream--but she didn't know how to find him. Should she roller-skate through the streets in the evenings when the streetlights flicker on? Should she stow away to Jamaica on a cruise ship and search for him in the rain forests and along the beaches? Would he come to her? Was he waiting, dreaming of her in the same way she waited and dreamed?"
— Francesca Lia Block (Witch Baby)

"Sometimes when I look at you, I feel as if I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
— Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)

"There's nothing good about goodnight when it means goodbye."
— Jeff Thomas

"There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing."
— Kahlil Gibrán (Sand and Foam)

"Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you."
— Publius Ovidius Naso (The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters)

"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)

"The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land - all things born of the soul that can only be felt."
— Anthony De Sa (Barnacle Love)