Quotes & Sayings About Wistfulness

None of this made any sense to Benjamin, however hard he tried. Roll-Up Reg was talking another language. But then, he was no more persuaded by the things his parents told him, or the teachers at school. It was the world, the world itself that was beyond his reach, this whole absurdly vast, complex, random, measureless construct, this never-ending ebb and flow of human relations, political relations, cultures, histories . . . How could anyone hope to master such things? It was not like music. Music always made sense. The music he heard that night was lucid, knowable, full of intelligence and humour, wistfulness and energy and hope. He would never understand the world, but he would always love this music. — Jonathan Coe

Only the shallowest person believes that they can attain true happiness by maximizing their wealth at any cost. In absence of morality, ethics, and a sustainable philosophy to guide us in an ethical search for happiness, we will always perceive life's random countervailing forces of adversity and unpleasantness as inflicting a great personal injustice upon us. Through application of a deeply embedded personal philosophy, we can push back against the negative implications of a life of suffering. We can use a philosophical stance to gain the perspective needed to say 'yes' to all of life, both its rosy path of ineffable joys and a blackened trail of tears. We must learn to accept life as it truly is and not waste precious time in wistfulness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The judge remembers to be a parent: a father in wistfulness, a mother in yearning, a God of grief flowing with tears beside the deathbed. The angry God remembers to be a God who cares about the beloved partner. God has noticed. God has noticed the mocking and the dying, the denial and the irrepressible pain.
To — Walter Brueggemann

Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity - and a touch of wistfulness - the stream of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first one equipage, then another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring "Home" to the driver. But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred. — Jean Webster

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life? — Joseph O'Neill

She didn't say anything, just a long, quiet "shhhh," as if she had learned that the troubles of the world could be absorbed and deafened by slow, steady wistfulness, and I suddenly understood that she'd been silencing the noise for the past twenty years. — Jennifer Ryan

Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." — Nicole Krauss

She bit her lower lip hard and blinked her eyes. There was such wistfulness and longing in his voice. Oh, she was going to give him back his eyes, or the next best thing, if it took her the rest of her life to do it. — Mary Balogh

We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little. I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin- a little fellow trying to do the best he could. — Walt Disney

They wept with joy, happy to see him alive. A smile crept across Fritz while being smothered in their affection, but all he could think about, and what he never forgot, were those mountains. — Dylan Callens

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness. — Dennis Potter

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments. — Victor Hugo

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. — Lorrie Moore

It was in this atmosphere of boozy wistfulness and dizzy exhaustion that Sylvia- along with Carol LeVarn- took her suitcase to the Barbizon roof and tossed each slip, stocking, sheath, and skirt into the night sky. "We took the elevator to the roof," recalls Carol, who refrained from tossing her own clothes off the Barbizon. "We stood there by the empty pool, which was all lit up. We were laughing. All this absurd phony fun we were having was over ... .We were just kind of giddy. I didn't see it as Sylvia throwing off a false self. It was just fun- a 'good-bye to all that' sort of thing. — Elizabeth Winder

I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament. — Aspen Matis

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I hope to depart in no other way than looking back with love and wistfulness and thinking, oh paintings that I would have made.. — Vincent Van Gogh

These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of sight, as if in spite of myself I were always descending a hill, rounding a corner, stepping into the street with a companion who urges me on, while I look back over my shoulder at the sight which recedes, vanishes. The present of my consciousness is itself a mystery which is also always just rounding a bend like a floating branch borne by a flood. Where am I? But I'm not. I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more ... — Annie Dillard

He glanced back at his ship, and a sigh escaped his lips, his heart fraught with the appreciation and melancholy that understanding his own situation must evince. His place as Captain of such a crew was as evanescent as the rest of life, and while they were all collected together now, being of the same character, the same mind, having the same predilections and ambitions, there was no saying when it might be over. He might be called away on urgent business, or his crew might grow anxious for a more settled life, Rannig might wish to return home, or the Director of the Marridon Academy might finally rot, calling Bartleby back to Marridon for the promotion he so richly deserved. He exhaled, reveling in the pining sigh of impermanence which living in such uncertainty must produce. — Michelle Franklin

I drank from the crisp mountain stream, tasting filtered sky with a mossy undertone. I've never understood how being loved fully could change your entire perspective of the world. I only ever understood the wistfulness of it, and the longing and the frothy, violent bits. The mixed up, rained on parts. The escaped bits that smudge and bleed through. Slowly, I am coming to terms with how vulnerable I am to you, flat on my back like a submissive wolf pup. Daisy petals line your eyelashes, juice of a nectarine flavors your tongue. The side of your mouth twitches, hazy dreamscapes overtaking your mind while we bathe in the glorious autumn devastation. — Taylor Rhodes

She caught her father one day at breakfast, between ministers with tactical problems and councillors with strategic ones. His face lit up when he saw her, and she made an embarrassed mental note to seek him out more often; he was not a man who had ever been able to enter into a child's games, but she might have noticed before this how wistfully he looked at her. But for perhaps the first time she was recognizing that wistfulness for what it was, the awkwardness of a father's love for a daughter he doesn't know how to talk to, not shame for what Aerin was, or could or could not do. — Robin McKinley

This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne
the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say. — Maryrose Wood

I know it doesn't make noise," he explained. "Going through the motions is comforting to me. I wish I had a real piano." The wistfulness in his tone was aching to hear.
"Did it used to have keys on it?" Livia asked.
"I did draw them once, but it was in pencil. No matter. My heart knows right where they are." He watched her as he tickled the pretend keys again. — Debra Anastasia

When your life is all taking, what need to learn courtship? Carcharos's passion for Jassi Belnarak deepened and darkened with every sleepless night, but it did not keep him from understanding that neither beneficence nor meek wistfulness would win her honestly. Power would have to do, after all; and I think that for the only time in that bad life, Carcharos may truly have regretted the necessity of forcing his will on another person. The moment can't have lasted long, but I think further that it may have been the closest Carcharos ever came to knowing love. — Peter S. Beagle

Her thoughts drifted to Tyler Dunn... to the feeling of being held in his arms. Wistfulness curled through her heart and she wished for the freedom to enjoy the attention of a man... to indulge in a lady-like flirtation... to fall in love. Although the wishes weren't new, for the first time, she had someone to weave the fantasy around. She could easily paint a romantic dream of living here with Tyler. But, Lily knew that dreaming about such a life would only make it harder to live with her reality. Yet, she couldn't help imagining him in the pool like this, naked as a newborn babe, yet all man. — Debra Holland

Breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. — Sinclair Lewis

His familiar husky voice sent a wave of wistfulness through me. A thousand memories spun in my head, tangling together- a rocky beach strewn with driftwood trees, a garage made of plastic sheds, warm sodas in a paper bag, a tiny room with one too-small shabby loveseat. The laughter in his deep-set black eyes, the feverish heat of his big hand around mine, the flash of his white teeth against his dark skin, his face stretching into the wide smile that had always been like a key to a secret door where only kindred spirits could enter. It felt sort of like homesickness, this longing for the place and person who had sheltered me through my darkest night. — Stephenie Meyer

A certain cynicism, born of the life she has led; a streak of strange wisdom; the wistfulness behind the gaiety; sometimes fear; and nearly always the memory of loneliness that hurts the soul. — Georgette Heyer

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it. — Lois McMaster Bujold

In private life, Lottie Blossom tended to substitute for wistfulness and pathos a sort of "Passed-For-Adults-Only" joviality which expressed itself outwardly in a brilliant and challenging smile, and inwardly and spiritually in her practice of keeping alligators in wickerwork baskets and asking unsuspecting strangers to lift the lid. — P.G. Wodehouse

Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he's a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn't exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn't a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be. — Margaret Atwood