Longing For My Son Quotes & Sayings

Everywhere he went he saw this same phenomenon - parents unmindful of their children, their attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own flesh and blood careened wildly through a chaotic and violent world behind their backs. The writer was even worse. He invented false worlds and peopled them with ghosts while his motherless son scanned the horizon for a human connection. It was shameful. What did a man need to lose to be shaken from his immersion in a dream? What terminal force could liberate him from the pursuit of phantoms and engage him in the living world around him? — Douglas Wynne

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, - a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro ... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, - this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. — W.E.B. Du Bois

You're a mountain
searching for it's echo! Whenever you hurt, you say, Lord God! The answer lives in that
which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this.
They make you clear. When they're gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where
to go. This is because you're uneven in your opening: sometimes closed and unreachable,
sometimes, with your shirt torn with longing. Your discursive intellect dominates for a
time; then the universal, beyond-time intelligence comes. Sell your questioning talents, my
son; buy bewildering surrender. Live simply and helpfully in that. Don't worry about
the University of Bukhara with its prestigious curriculum. — Rumi

The young man being embraced by the Father is no longer just one repentant sinner, but the whole of humanity returning to God. The broken body of the prodigal becomes the broken body of humanity, and the baby-like face of the returning child becomes the face of all suffering people longing to reenter the lost paradise. Thus Rembrandt's painting becomes more than the mere portrayal of a moving parable. It becomes the summary of the history of our salvation. The light surrounding both Father and Son now speaks of the glory that awaits the children of God. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

I won't forgive this wrong done to me and my house, whoever it was that killed my boys, I shall put a curse on their house that they will have no first born son to inherit. Whoever took my son will lose his son. He will spend his life longing for an heir. He will bury his first born and long for him, for I cannot even bury mine. — Philippa Gregory

Though he was tired of loneliness - tired down to the depths of his heart - that was really not was troubled him most. What tortured him was the hunger in his soul. A longing. A quiet voice that could not be stilled. Not a threatening voice - or a nagging one. But a persistent calling. Like a parent who calls an errant child back to dinner. Or a father who calls for a son to join him down at the pier for a fishing trip; like a voice echoing off the lake. It was a strangely familiar voice that was calling. A little like the memory of a reunion, long forgotten. Why did he resist it, even fear it? Why would he not respond to a call that came to him in a way that sounded, and felt, so much like family? — Craig Parshall

It wasn't shared social status or ethnicity that brought Jesus' followers together either, nor was it total agreement on exactly who this Jesus character was - a prophet? The Messiah? The Son of God? No, there is one thing that connected all these dissimilar people together it was a shared sense of need: a hunger, a thirst, a longing. It was the certainty that, when Jesus said He came for the sick, this meant Jesus came for me. — Rachel Held Evans

Still, through a complex combination of optimism and longing and bravado, you would round it up. While a cruder name for this process is lying , one could make a case that delusion is a variant of generosity. After all, you practiced rounding up on Kevin from the day he was born.

Me, I'm a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus. At the risk of tautology, I like people only as much as I like them. I lead an emotional life of such arithmetic precision, carried to two or three digits after the decimal, that I am even willing to allow for degrees of agreeableness in my own son. In other words, Franklin: I leave the $17. — Lionel Shriver

If you will count, count the stars, dear one. How many stars in the sky, looking down on us as we lie in each other's arms and taste joy? How many gleaming fish in the lake where I splash our son in the water and hear his streaks of glee ring out in the clear air? A fine little salmon you made, that night in the rain. How many times does the heart beat, how fast does the blood run when at last we touch, and touch again, and breathe the same desperate, longing breath? Count those things, for they are the stuff of life and hope. — Juliet Marillier

And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes. — Elizabeth Strout