Longing To Be Loved Quotes & Sayings

She had long since found peace. And Frederick, from her passionately loved bridegroom, from her worshipped young husband, had become second only to God on her list of duties and forbearances. There he hung, the second in importance, a bloodless thing bled white by her prayers. For years she had been able to be happy only by forgetting happiness. She wanted to stay like that. She wanted to shut out everything that would remind her of beautiful things, that might set her off again longing, desiring... — Elizabeth Von Armin

The great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again. — Albert Camus

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

Moon, that against the lintel of the west
Your forehead lean until the gate be swung,
Longing to leave the world and be at rest,
Being worn with faring and no longer young,
Do you recall at all the Carian hill
Where worn with loving, loving late you lay,
Halting the sun because you lingered still,
While wondering candles lit the Carian day?
Ah, if indeed this memory to your mind
Recall some sweet employment, pity me,
That even now the dawn's dim herald see!
I charge you, goddess, in the name of one
You loved as well: endure, hold off the sun. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

At the core of who we are, we crave the acceptance that comes from being loved. To satisfy this longing we will either be graspers of God's love or grabbers for people's love. — Lysa TerKeurst

She loved him in a way that was necessary, not luxurious. She loved him like the tide loves the sand - trapped together, one lost without the other, pushed and pulled, but never ripped apart. She loved him in a deep and singular way, almost as though God had crafted one heart in heaven, then split it between Holden's body and hers, fating her to a never-ending longing to be with him, or a fractional life without him. — Katy Regnery

Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don't know. My whole body craves to be held. I am desperate to love and be loved. I want my mind to float into another's. I want to be set free from despair by the love I feel for another. I want to be physically part of someone else. I want to be joined. I want to be open and free to explore every part of them, as though I were exploring myself. — Tracey Emin

For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging. We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward .We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of our first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning
clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again. — Bell Hooks

For the past six years, I've become a student on longing. I've read hundreds of books, articles, and studies on relationships, attended workshops, and sought the advice of spiritual counselors and trusted friends. And this is what I've learned: all of us long to be loved; we are searching for that perfect love - the perfect union that we read about in romantic novels or see on the silver screen. What we fail to realize is that we are human and because we are human, we are imperfect. We seek the impossible: perfect love from imperfect people. We fail to see that our longing for unconditional, perfect, or divine love can only be satiated by reunion and communion with the divine. — Randy Siegel

When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I stopped to think about my Grandpa writing to my Grandma, knowing how much he loved her and how many years he spent without her after her death, I knew I wouldn't be able to make it through just one letter without an onslaught of tears. And it was Grandpa, a voice I knew so well. One that I miss terribly. — Kara Martinelli

He kissed her. And she kissed him. And it was infatuation, and it was hunger, and it was longing to be loved, and it was an all-consuming fire so hot it devoured worry and loneliness and fear and time and being and thought itself. They kissed, embracing, flying, and for a hundred heartbeats, there was no war, no death, no pain, nothing hard, nothing terrible, nothing but warmth and acceptance. — Brent Weeks

They that have beauty, let them be thankful for it, and make a good use of it, let them console themselves, and do the best they can without it: certainly, though liable to be over-estimated, it is a gift of God, and not to be despised. Many will feel this who have felt that they could love, and whose hearts tell them that they are worthy to be loved again; while yet they are debarred, by the lack of this or some such seeming trifle, from giving and receiving that happiness they seem almost made to feel and to impart. As well might the humble glowworm despise that power of giving light without which the roving fly might pass her and repass her a thousand times, and never rest beside her: she might hear her winged darling buzzing over and around her; he vainly seeking her, she longing to be found, but with no power to make her presence known, no voice to call him, no wings to follow his flight;
the fly must seek another mate, the worm must live and die alone. — Anne Bronte

I've always loved tales of broken lovers who roam through countrysides singing their stories of woe and separation, their honey- sweet longing for the next life when they can suddenly be re united. It makes other people happy, you see. It makes people grateful that it hasn't happened to them. — Roshani Chokshi

Honestly, my deepest longing was to have a normal relationship, to love and be loved — Richelle Mead

The longing to belong and to be prized by one's peers permeates childhood and adolescence and can be compelling and anxiety provoking at any time in life, as the common dread of cocktail parties in adulthood attests. This need -- as old and as potent as erotic desire -- is a fundamental part of being human; according to object relations theory, we become ourselves by being recognized and loved by others. — Jeanne Safer

No one's approval is enough to make up for a lack of self-love, which is really a lack of self-awareness.
When we feel a desire to be loved, it isn't other people's love we need. It's our own relationship with love that we're longing for, our own awareness of being interconnected with others, our own sense of the magic of our own interwoven existence.
To seek the fulfillment of this desire in others' approval is a losing battle. It will never be enough. No one can compliment you enough to supplement for the acceptance that you need from your own self, in each moment. Acceptance for your struggles and your talents. Acceptance for your humanity. Celebration of that humanity.
Love is an inside job. — Vironika Tugaleva

That was what it meant to be loved
there were people who would never give up looking and longing for you, no matter how far you wandered lost. — Scott Russell Sanders

Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?"), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell. — Richard Yates

It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety. — John Steinbeck

I'm afraid many women do choose the wedding over the marriage. It seems a steep price to pay, but it comes from a place of deep, sad longing to be loved and to have it proven that you are of value. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The longing of every heart is to be loved. — Lailah Gifty Akita

For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life - pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures - and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.
Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not "How am I to find God?" but "How am I to let myself be found by him?" The question is not "How am I to know God?" but "How am I to let myself be known by God?" And, finally, the question is not "How am I to love God?" but "How am I to let myself be loved by God?" God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

I looked to my boyfriend to satisfy my Godbreathed longing for acceptance. I had my first glimpse of what it might feel like to be loved in a romantic way. It didn't take long for me to become addicted to that feeling. — Emily P. Freeman

But here's a little secret, between you, me, and the rest of the mall: buying shit isn't enough. What we wish for in our secret hearts is self-expression, the chance to reveal ourselves and to be loved for this revelation, devoured by love. And thus, most of us go about our duties of commerce and leisure in a state of perpetual longing, with nocturnal excursions into the province of despair. — Steve Almond

We love films because they make us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also. They tell us to remember; they remind us of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken. Remember about death and suffering and the complexities of living. Remember what it is like to love someone. Remember how it is to be loved. Remember what you feel in this moment. Remember this. Remember this. — Nina LaCour

The things I need to say can only be written furtively on scraps of smuggled paper, in moments of time stolen from the dead for the sake of their memory. They can only be hidden away in tins and jars, carefully sealed with scraps of cloth and hidden with great fear and greater longing amid fragmented bones - buried in the uncaring ground soaked with our blood. We bury them as we could not bury our loved ones. These things can never be told. — Ovadya Ben Malka

What I saw there explained everything
the reason he had stayed away, why he had come to say good-bye. I can only describe what I saw by its effect on me. Every woman should be looked at in such a way, at least once her life. With a longing that cannot be contained
with love that goes beyond mere feeling because it transforms and-like the verse of the poem he had read
it dissolves, as an offering, a gift. I felt my face flush and waves of knowing suffused every pore, every cell of my being. I was loved. And in that love, I felt beauty
my own, unrealized until that moment, suddenly rising to consciousness in a way that made everything in me come alive to the beauty all around me. Nothing more needed to be said. — Nafisa Haji

-and this could be the fire
and the wine, an idea she would like to discuss with him, or simply the pleasurable
longing involved in wanting to know when he would come back - Maria would stop what she was doing, smile up at the sky and give thanks for being alive and to be expecting nothing from the man she loved.
On the other hand, if her heart began to complain about his absence or about things she shouldn't have said while they were together, she would say to herself:
'Oh, so you want to think about that, do you? All right, then, you do what you like, while I get on with more important things. — Paulo Coelho

She loved him in a deep and singular way, almost as though God had crafted one heart in heaven, then split it between Holden's body and hers, fating her to a never-ending longing to be with him, or a fractional life without him. She — Katy Regnery

The Etymologiae says that bees are virtuous because they are much loved by all, and sought after with great longing by everyone, because their honey tastes as sweet in the mouths of paupers as in the mouths of kings. Do you think that's logical? That a creature can be virtuous just because it is loved and sought after, that the act of being loved, of being sought after, even if it is passive, is equal to an act of martyrdom or great piety, which is active? That it can confer grace to a whole species? — Catherynne M Valente

We all have a relentless yearning to attach and connect, to love and be loved. This relationship hunger is the fiercest longing of the human soul. — Dave Earley

For a moment, the color leeched from his face, then he blinked and smiled. Margaret, for a second I thought it was your mama standing there. He gave a gruff laugh. You look lovely, my dear.
Her father's praise brought tears to her eyes. His approving words came far too infrequently. Was her appearance all that mattered to him-to anyone? It seemed to be the way of the world. No one cared about who she was on the inside. No one saw the heart longing to be loved and to love in return. She sometimes even doubted God's love for her. — Colleen Coble

She was not sure if she would want him to have known; we do not always wish for those for whom we long to know that we long for them, especially if the longing is impossible, or inappropriate ... to be loved by the unlovable was not something that most people could cope with. — Alexander McCall Smith

Saudade.
A nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; "the love that remains". — Anonymous