Pining For Love Quotes & Sayings

We may live without poetry, music, and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
He may live without books, - what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope, - what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love, - what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining? — Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

It's always gratifying to share a hobby with a friend, and pining for erstwhile suitors falls into that category. In the months to come, Libby and I would analyze our respective exes with the gusto and intellectual rigor of Jesuits. — Patricia Marx

Trying to live in the past didn't work for me, and it's only now that I fully realize I'm incredibly lucky it didn't. Because it would have been all too sad to miss out on right now. That would have turned the past into a fraud. It would have meant all my happy memories were a lie. It would have meant all that time and all that love was a waste, leading up to a wasted future. It would have been the ultimate betrayal of everything I thought my whole life was about and everyone I cared about. All the people who loved me, in all the times and places of my life - all the people who made a lover out of me - they would have all been wrong about me. And it could have happened easily, just like that. It's scary to think of how I could have gotten stuck pining for the past. I was lucky to get a second chance. I thought I was too late, but it turns out I was just in time. — Rob Sheffield

Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love ... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly. — Audrey Niffenegger

There are people who claim to love humanity, while others object that we can love only in the singular, that is, only individuals. I agree and add that what goes for love also goes for hate. Man, this being pining for equilibrium, balances the weight of the evil piled on his back with the weight of his hatred. But try directing your hatred at mere abstract principles, at injustice, fanaticism, cruelty, or, if you've managed to find the human principle itself hateful, then try hating mankind! Such hatreds are beyond human capacity, and so man, if he wishes to relieve his anger (aware as he is of its limited power) concentrates it on a single individual. — Milan Kundera

Barrons laughed again. And there, my dear Fio, you make one of Womankind's greatest mistakes: Falling in love with a man's potential. We so rarely share the same view of it, and even more rarely care to achieve it. Stop pining for the man you think I could be
and take a good, long, hard look at the one I am. — Karen Marie Moning

In an age where the lowered eyelid is just a sign of fatigue, the delicate game of love is pining away. Freud and flirtation are poor companions. — Marya Mannes

And so I found myself in a kind of love lock: pining for the wrong person, grieving beside a woman whose body I can't touch, being given a second chance I can't find the clarity to take. — Courtney Maum

There is a social contract between the readers/buyers of romance novels and the novelists who write them. It's this: the girl ends up with the guy about whom and for which legions of fans have been pining. It's the reason we pick up romance novels in the first place. We want to read about a coupling so intense, it speaks to a deep place inside of us, an atavistic need to be consumed by lust, passion and love. That is the social contract. — Allison

SoulsThat we might break these molds
And free our restless souls
Start to believe
That we can rise above
Our pettiness and love
Like we ain't loved before
Free on this earth
As the surf that rolls
And crashes on the shore
And hey now don't run and hide
Your little heart away
If it's gone
We'll sure never find it
Pining for lost innocence
Tantalisingly I saw
Our shadows moving through the door
Traces from a different time
When I was yours and you were truly mine
All mine — David Gray

I think that the right girl can wipe away the memories of the wrong girl." Wow. Okay.
"Sure." But I don't think that. If that were true, there wouldn't be so many humans pining for their long, lost love. We didn't always
want what was right. We wanted what we couldn't have — Tarryn Fisher

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented. — Thomas Mann

The way I see it, everyone's been telling the story wrong. I mean, take Cinderella, for example. She never asked for a Prince, let alone waited around for one. Hell, all she ever wanted was a night off from work and a fancy dress to twirl in for a few hours. It's never made sense to me that I'm supposed to sit around pining for some mythical Prince Charming to get off his ass and rescue me. If that's the grand game plan, I could end up waiting forever. Because, I mean, if he's anything like the rest of the male population, the prince is probably stuck in traffic somewhere, or got lost along the way and is too damn stubborn to ask for directions. — Julie Johnson

She broke my heart over and over, day after day, but I love her. — Kelly Moran

You're pining," said Jace.
Alec shrugged. "Look who's talking. 'oh I love her. Oh, she's my sister. Oh why, why, why - — Cassandra Clare

People like music when they're in love, but they don't need it as much. You need music when you're missing someone or you're pining for someone or you're forgetting someone or you're trying to process what just happened. — Taylor Swift

But fierce as my attraction was, I also knew that it was more than just a physical attraction [ ... ], more than just a momentenry surge of animal desire. I understood that she wasn't a terribly articulate person and nothing she said that afternoon was particularly brilliant or memorable. And yet there I was in a state of maximum torment - burning and longing and pining, a man trapped in the spines of love. — Paul Auster

The ghost of a smile appeared on her face. Learn to love the moment you are in. Treasure your experiences, for precious moments too quickly pass you by, and if you are always rushing toward the future, or pining for the past, you will forget to enjoy and appreciate the present. — Colleen Houck

I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing. — Khushwant Singh

In all things, the beginning and end are the most engaging. Does the love of man and woman suggest only their embraces? No, the sorrow of lovers parted before they met, laments over promises betrayed, long lonely nights spent sleepless until dawn, pining thoughts for one in some far place, a woman left sighing over past love in her tumbledown abode - it is these, surely, that embody the romance of love. — Yoshida Kenko

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.

I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream.

"You — Carol Ann Duffy

I am not a huge fan of the one-sided pining romances where the guy is a perfect love-object because we don't see inside his head. — Maggie Stiefvater

A dying girl.
A pining boy.
And a whole lot of robbed years. — A.A. Gupte

Love brings much happiness, much more so than pining for someone brings pain. — Albert Einstein

E had trampled her poor, pining heart, and the wound was still raw, even these many years later. — Ransom Riggs

It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man's table; and he sat down, at first, with some constraint, and awkwardness; but they all exhaled and went off like fog, in the genial morning rays of this simple overflowing kindness.
This indeed, was a home, - home, -a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in His providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good-will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

But while you're sitting around pining and waiting and wondering and hoping that this perfect love happens, lots of guys and lots of dates and lots of kisses are passing you by. — Lauren Morrill

We're at war.
On the verge of an apocalypse filled with monsters and torture in a nightmare world.
And I'm standing here, a moonstruck teenager pining for an enemy soldier. What am I, crazy?
This time, I'm the first to turn away. — Susan Ee

We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspect of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime. — Nina Sankovitch

Call me hopeless romantic but I want to see my friend with the guy she's been pining for forever ... I want that more than anything on this earth. — Kristen Ashley

What did he have to mope about, really? What more did he want? ... Love. Purpose. Those are the things that you can't plan for. Those are the things that just happen. And what if they don't happen? Do you spend your whole life pining for them? Waiting to be happy? — Rainbow Rowell

Even Annie did not then know that it was the soul's hunger, the vague sense of a need which nothing but the God of human faces, the God of the morning and of the starful night, the God of love and self-forgetfulness, can satisfy, that sent her money-loving, poverty-stricken, pining, grumbling old aunt out staring towards the east. It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know what they look for in reality is their God! This is that for which their heart and their flesh cry out. — George MacDonald

I can't keep doing this to myself, getting my hopes up so high, only to have them come crashing down. I can't keep waiting for him to come to his senses, having my whole emotional state rest on what he decides. What if he never wakes up to how perfect we'd be together? What if I spend another year pining for him - or longer even? In a terrible flash, I see my future stretching out before me: waiting for his calls, rearranging my life around college visits, and decoding texts and instant messages like they could be something real, something true.
This isn't love; this is pure torment. — Abby McDonald

Damn it, it wasn't right. When she lay abed at night, she shouldn't see charging boars and violent tussles. She should dream of the scent of night-blooming jasmine and the texture of organdy and the distant strains of an orchestra playing a stately sarabande. As he had, all those freezing, damp nights.
As he would, in all the bitter years to come.
What had she called him, last night? An insufferable, arrogant cad. Yes, he was.
He wanted Cecily pining for him forever, dreaming she could tame him, yearning for the tender love he could never, ever give.
He wanted her to remember the old Luke, not fantasize about some uncivilized beast.
And if this "werestag" had eclipsed the memory of their kiss with his gory midnight rescue . . .
Luke just would have to do it one better, and give Cecily a new memory to occupy her thoughts. An experience she could never forget. — Tessa Dare

When it comes to love, always be open. Because the second youre not pining after a boy, or a boyfriend, amazing love comes into your life. — Emma Roberts

Call it professional interest. You see, Jessamine, love is a kind of poison; one of my favorite kinds, in fact. It infects the blood; it takes over the mind; it seizes dominion over the body. It amuses me to think of him pining for you. Aching for what he cannot have. The loneliness in his soul is festering like a wound. There is nothing I could do for him that is worse that what you have already done, my lovely. And I assure you, in his case there will be no cure. — Maryrose Wood

I'm not the kind of man to bottle up my feelings, Kells. I don't sit up in my room pining away, writing love poems. I'm not a dreamer. I'm a fighter. I'm a man of action, and it will take all of my self-control not to fight for this. When something needs to be done, I do it. When I feel something, I act on it. I don't see any reason why Ren deserves to get the girl of his dreams and I don't. It doesn't seem fair that this happens to me twice. — Colleen Houck