Hara S. > Hara S.'s Quotes

“I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin.
And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin.
I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies.
John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat.
The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies.
But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.”
― Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

“When I was little and running on the race track at school, I always stopped and waited for all the other kids so we could run together even though I knew (and everybody else knew) that I could run much faster than all of them! I pretended to read slowly so I could "wait" for everyone else who couldn't read as fast as I could! When my friends were short I pretended that I was short too and if my friend was sad I pretended to be unhappy. I could go on and on about all the ways I have limited myself, my whole life, by "waiting" for people. And the only thing that I've ever received in return is people thinking that they are faster than me, people thinking that they can make me feel bad about myself just because I let them and people thinking that I have to do whatever they say I should do. My mother used to teach me "Cinderella is a perfect example to be" but I have learned that Cinderella can go fuck herself, I'm not waiting for anybody, anymore! I'm going to run as fast as I can, fly as high as I can, I am going to soar and if you want you can come with me! But I'm not waiting for you anymore.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a "Reserved" sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I'd never see her again.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Are you ready?" Klaus asked finally.
"No," Sunny answered.
"Me neither," Violet said, "but if we wait until we're ready we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives, Let's go.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator

“I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.”
― E. V. Lucas

“Is that why you've been pushing me away? Because of how you look? [...] I waited for you my whole life. Yearned for you my whole life. After Tersa told me you were coming, I spent seven hundred years searching for you[....] I never gave a damn what you looked like--tall, short, fat, thin, plain, beautiful, ugly. Why would I care about what you looked like? The flesh was the shell that housed the glory[....] Even if I couldn't be your physical lover, there are other ways to be a lover and I know them all. So don't stand there and tell me how you feel depends on how you look!”
― Anne Bishop, Dreams Made Flesh

“Everybody is waiting for cooler weather--and I am just waiting for you--. (Bob Dylan in a letter)”
― Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties

“The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring. Or the phone.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Time felt slower when we do nothing but wait.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“In the end, the train stood 2 hours motionless in the middle of nowhere.
Every minute seemed like an eternity.
Time felt crept by slowly, with clear malice towards me. All I could do was grip my teeth and try to hold back my tears...
Akari... Please, don't wait for me...
If you'd just go home.”
― Makoto Shinkai, 5 Centimeters per Second

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“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.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“My heart only ever had one thought, one want. One need. Despite all, in spite of all...All my heart has ever wanted is you.”
― Stephanie Laurens, The Edge of Desire

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”
― George Eliot

“You really didn't see the sadness or the longing unless you already knew it was there. But that was the trick, wasn't it? Everyone had their disappointment and their baggage; only, some people carried it in their inside pockets and not on their backs.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“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

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...

Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.

The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I am running after you, and life, in desperate pursuit. My dream is that someday you will both turn and let me catch you. That dream carries me through every night... I have enclosed a hundred kisses in this letter. You must count them out carefully and not lose any.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Seduce Me at Sunrise

“One of the deepest longings of the human soul is to be seen.”
― John O'Donohue

“Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there..”
― Train, Train - Drops of Jupiter

“It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.”
― Samuel Beckett

“There’s nothing like that feeling of waiting for a guy. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world. Holding that cell phone in your hand as you take out the trash, use the bathroom, change the litter box. Fearful that the one second you aren’t looking will be when they call. Pathetic. And something I have done as recently as last week.”
― Hilary Winston, My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me

“...But the heart is not a computer that can be upgraded so quickly and easily with the latest version of love.

Love cannot be sealed hermetically inside a tight box like any other on the store shelf; even though the word itself is in public domain, its quality is not.

Love cannot promise a full customer satisfaction garanteed or a whole lifetime of dreams shared refunded, with no questions asked.
Love cannot be agreed to in terms and conditions as quickly as the "Next" button being clicked. These unspoken terms and conditions grow and develop over time until it gets very messy, and no one remembers how such a mess of accusation and anger was able to overshadow their pure ecstasy of love, the spark between two people turning on a new operation system of togetherness for the first time.

Love is always beta; never a golden master.

If love were a computer, constant bug reports and subsequent fixes are the name of the game, and there are many unexplained breakdowns. The heart is too stubborn for explanations and too impatient for forgiveness, and there is usually no one at the tech support line.

Forgive me stan, if I've crashed so often. It's just to hard to boot up to a whole new future without you. I am an empty monitor in search of a "hello.”
― Raymond Luczak

“I will never claim to know what you are thinking. I only hope I am on your mind.”
― Amanda Mosher, Better to be able to love than to be loveable

“And there you have it...if I knew that I could only have a few nights in that man's arms or nothing, I would take those magic nights and use them to keep me warm for the rest of my life.”
― Karen Marie Moning, To Tame a Highland Warrior

“..he wanted her.
And at another time, as another man, he would have her. Without hesitation. As lover. . . as more.”
― Sarah MacLean