Thoughts on { Longing | Homer / Virginia Woolf / T.H. White / Khalil Gibran / Edna St. Vincent Millay / David Foster Wallace / Roger de Bussy-Rabutin
Anon
“There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”
Homer, The Iliad, c 660 BCE
“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927
“She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.”
T.H. White, The Once and Future King, 1958
“Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.”
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, 1618-93
“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, 1892-1950
“There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.”
Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam, 1926
“It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.”
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 1996
