Yearn Quotes & Sayings

There are far too many silent sufferers. Not because they don't yearn to reach out, but because they've tried and found no one who cares. — Richelle E. Goodrich

... yearn for halcyon days of yore". — John Green

I yearn for empty thoughts and silence in my head. For someone to sit down beside me, to hold my hand and take away the cold sting of loneliness that creeps under my skin like an English winter. — Malia Zaidi

You wander through this city, and wonder if anything you do will make up for the horror that keeps the world turning. To live, you rip your own heart from your chest and hide it in a box somewhere, along with everything you ever learned about justice, compassion, mercy. You throw yourself into games to mark the time. And if you yearn for something different: what would you change? Would you bring back the blood, the dying cries, the sucking chest wounds? The constant war? So we're caught between two poles of hypocrisy. We sacrifice our right to think of ourselves as good people, our right to think our life is good, our city is just. And so we and our city both survive. — Max Gladstone

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change. — Atul Gawande

It's the exile's dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return. — Lauren Willig

Matter what a man does if he's ready to take the consequences. Well, I'm ready to take the consequences. You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it's the only thing I've got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It — W. Somerset Maugham

I yearn to live and love and burn, and yet so much of my time is spent faking and forgetting, faking and forgetting I carry out my disbelief with uninspired hands, my eyes shut, my emotions dulled, my spirit numb. In times like these I am in desperate need of truth to come to me like a blinding light, like a splinter in my soul, reminding me of the brevity of my time here on earth. — Jon Foreman

To believe in God is to yearn for His existence, and furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist. — Miguel De Unamuno

Open to them your hand to the shore, watch them walk into the sea.
Press upon them all they need, see them yearn for all they want.
Gift to them the calm pool of words, watch them draw the sword.
Bless upon them the satiation of peace, see them starve for war.
Grant them darkness and they will lust for light.
Deliver to them death and hear them beg for life.
Beget life and they will murder your kin.
Be as they are and they will see you different.
Show wisdom and you are a fool.
The shore gives way to the sea.
And the sea, my friends,
Does not dream of you. — Steven Erikson

She is very wonderful, Bertie. She is not one of these flippant, shallow-minded, modern girls. She is sweetly grave and beautifully earnest. She reminds me of - what is the name I want?"
"Marie Lloyd?"
"Saint Cecilia," said young Bingo, eyeing me with a good deal of loathing. "She reminds me of Saint Cecilia. She makes me yearn to be a better, nobler, deeper, broader man. — P.G. Wodehouse

I do think that people yearn for connection and intimacy, and that they're hard things to achieve. — Chelsea Martin

Something deep in the human psyche has always seemed to yearn for ever more enhanced levels of savagery. — Robert Dunbar

Why do so many people yearn for an eternal life when they don't even know what to do with themselves in this brief one? — Sydney J. Harris

And they see, for a moment,
Stretching out, like the desert
In its weary, unprofitable length,
Their faded ignoble lives.

While the locks are yet brown on thy head,
While the soul still looks through thine eyes,
While the heart still pours
The mantling blood to thy cheek,
Sink, O Youth, in thy soul!
Yearn to the greatness of Nature!
Rally the good in the depths of thyself. — Matthew Arnold

You are a labyrinth of chaos where I yearn to wander forever. — Remesh R.

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes. — Meg Rosoff

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any "blueness." Above all, I want to stop missing you. — Maggie Nelson

It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe ... — Joseph O'Neill

As Washington, Adams, and Jefferson reached the cusp of adulthood, each exhibited a passion for independence. Each hungered for emancipation from the entanglements of childhood and sought to carve out an autonomous existence. The handmaiden to each young man's zeal for self-mastery was a propulsive ambition that drove him to yearn for more than his father had attained, for more even than his father had ever hoped to achieve. — John Ferling

Most people yearn to contribute, make the world a better place and have success ... all at the same time ... Make sure to give your business a background, a mission and a story. That might be the most important step part of any venture. And remember, giving may be the best investment you ever make. — Blake Mycoskie

Leadership expert Michael Hyatt reflected on Karnazes's life and drew three conclusions about why we should embrace discomfort: 1. Comfort is overrated. It doesn't lead to happiness. It makes us lazy - and forgetful. It often leads to self-absorption, boredom, and discontent. 2. Discomfort can be a catalyst for growth. It makes us yearn for something more. It forces us to change, stretch, and adapt. 3. Discomfort is often a sign we're making progress. You've heard the expression, "no pain, no gain." It's true! When you push yourself to grow, you will experience discomfort.2 — Samuel Chand

And I learned all those many years ago to stop listening to what people said, and listen instead to what they mean. Some people speak with honey and intend to serve us poison. You, my lord, speak with thorns but yearn for cake. — Kathleen Baldwin

I kept looking for happiness, and then I realized: This is it. It's a moment, and it comes, and it goes, and it'll come back again. I yearn for things, but at the same time I'm just peaceful. — Nicole Kidman

You spoke about things they couldn't see and so they laughed. Yet to row up the dark river against the current, to take the unknown road blindly, stubbornly, and to search for words rooted like the knotted olive tree- let them laugh. And to yearn for the other world to inhabit today's suffocating loneliness, this ravaged present- let them be. — Giorgos Seferis

Every Christian must be a broken person. To enter the kingdom, we must acknowledge that the inner peace we yearn for can never come by our own efforts but only by admitting we are powerless to conquer our self-centeredness and by turning over the rule of our life to Christ. Our sinful hearts show themselves through what we do and what we fail to do. We end up broken not only because we are victims but also because we have hearts of rebellion and stubborn independence. — Mark R. McMinn

Tell me what you yearn for and I shall tell you who you are. We are what we reach for, the idealized image that drives our wandering. — James Hillman

When healers yearn to kill then hope begins to die ... Evil cannot be overcome by evil. — David Gemmell

God shakes our confidence in our earthly life so that we can yearn for our heavenly life, where our joy is truly unshakable and where our wailing will be turned into dancing. Prayer: — Timothy J. Keller

I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe. — Sebastian Horsley

Today, I will look around & enjoy all the beautiful things that are around me rather than yearn for things that are beyond my control & become miserable.-RVM — R.v.m.

When your knowlege increases over time, yearn to learn to dance in your mind. — Debasish Mridha

MOMENTS OF great import are often tinged with darkness because perversely we yearn to be let down. — Courtney Maum

Why don't you give up drinking?"
"Because I don't choose. It doesn't matter what a man does if he's ready to take the consequences. Well, I'm ready to take the consequences. You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it's the only thing I've got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart you despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent and the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am ready to pay. — W. Somerset Maugham

All the talk about virgins recently had made him secretly yearn for some of the Nectar that they produced in their young wombs.It must have been at least fifty years since he had last tasted a virgin's Nectar. And that came from the lovely Metis, the neighbour's daughter, who subsequently became his wife.
Virgins were supposed to have hymens, yet he had never seen his wife's hymen."You don't notice such things when you are young", he told himself. All his three daughters had grown up from virgins to adults without him ever noticing them having hymens. They were all happily married now, with families of their own.[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

Like all Israelis, I yearn for peace. I see the utmost importance in taking all possible steps that will lead to a solution of the conflict with the Palestinians. — Ariel Sharon

The disciples of the One resurrected are the oddest of people; we live honestly in the now but yearn for a future so greatly that we take on its future characteristics. In a world of competition, power, and hatred, we live into the future by taking on the future's characteristics of being last, weak, and loving. In this way we provide a world that knows only certainty, immediacy, and domination with a vision of the future encompassed in the faith, hope, and love made possible by the resurrection of Jesus, who has been crucified as our place-sharer. — Andrew Root

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth? — Ursula K. Le Guin

As the seasons age us
I close my eyes and wish for snow
Alas the Irish seasons been foretold
For Spring will dawn and I will go
Into another season Jack Frost cold.
And when its here, I wish for night
As childhood memories flash right by
To see the birds in humble flight
I wish for Summer with a sigh
And on I go to months so sweet
Dawns sweet chorus and sunbeams bright
I yearn for Autumn leaves under feet
Yet now I dream of Winters night
As Auld Lang Syne rings in New Year
Alas! I'm one year older as Spring draws near. — Michelle Geaney

There is only silence. A hollow silence for victors and losers all.
I am empty.
What do I do now? There was always a fear, always a concern, always a reason to hoard weapons and food, always a quest or trial. Now, nothing. Just the wind sweeping in over our battlefield. An empty battlefield filled only with echoes of things lost and learned. Friends. Lessons. Soon it will be a memory. I feel like a lover has died. I yearn to cry. Feel hollow. Adrift. I look for Mustang. Will she still care for me? — Pierce Brown

Your Nafs is just like a suckling child. If you do not take the pains to wean him, he will yearn for his mother's breast even when he's grown up. Therefore you should not try to satisfy your lust by indulging in sins. This will only increase the desire for more sins. The same is the case with the disease of gluttony. The more a person eats, the more his hunger increases. — Busiri

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal. — Pamela Paul

They hope they'll learn to be happier together. They also yearn, sometimes, for the point at which misery becomes so profound as to leave them no alternative. — Michael Cunningham

He was a man built to yearn for what he could not have. — Anne Perry

Remember that you will derive strength by reflecting that the saints yearn for you to join their ranks; desire to see you fight bravely, and that you behave like true knights in your encounters with the same adversities which they had to conquer, and that breathtaking joy is theirs and your eternal reward for having endured a few years of temporal pain. Every drop of earthly bitterness will be changed into an ocean of heavenly sweetness. — Henry Suso

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing - a blanket - the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water. — Douglas Coupland

Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren't the way we've pictured them and that we absolutely don't belong with them, as we've talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion. — Thomas Bernhard

I yearn to love, but learn to hate. — Matthew Brown

I threw my arms around him. "I yearn only for you."
Quinton gave a self-conscious shrug and an embarrassed laugh. "I feel the same way about you and I'm sorry I'm . . . being an ass. Also, I suspect you just wanted to use 'yearn' in a sentence. — Kat Richardson

It's the correct thing to say that a man needs no more than six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. And they say, too, now, that if our intellectual classes are attracted to the land and yearn for a farm, it's a good thing. But these farms are just the same as six feet of earth. To retreat from town, from the struggle, from the bustle of life, to retreat and bury oneself in one's farm - it's not life, it's egoism, laziness, it's monasticism of a sort, but monasticism without good works. A man does not need six feet of earth or a farm, but the whole globe, all nature, where he can have room to display all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit. — Anton Chekhov

I see You, Every time I look into Buddha's eyes. I give myself to You. Every time I alter one of Your 1,000s names. Honestly & fully I love You. Through Christ and Maria, Shiva and Shakti, Krishna and Radha, With every day that passes and every breath I take. I enter gratitude for receiving Your Love. Obeying Your Laws of Truthfulness and Ahimsa, Weaving Prana With hearts and souls of Gaia. Through mysticism, shamanism, sufism, and ecstatic meditations. I yearn to touch You, to feel You, to be You. Within this amazing Journey of Awareness of Your Consciousness. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted - Balder, Persephone - but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them. — E. M. Forster

I do not desire to die soon, because in Heaven there is no suffering. I desire to live a long time because I yearn to suffer much for the love of my Spouse. — Magdalena De Pazzi

For years, we in publishing have been hearing from Catholic readers that they really yearn for Catholic fiction. — Regina Doman

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!
But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
And the wild days set true hearts bleeding. — Conrad Aiken

Love seeks nothing other than its own expression. Love never changes. It doesn't need explanation. It is the space between two people that makes them yearn for someone who becomes God. — Vatsal Surti

Through study and learning they earn the pleasure of princes-
What comes of such learning?
Butter never rises from boiling sour milk.
Speak bird! What do you yearn by pecking newly sprouted grain?
Nursing one broken heart, Bahu, is equal to the worship of many years. — Sultan Bahu

I am not a perfectionist, but still I seek perfection. I am not a great romantic, but yet I yearn 4 affection — Tupac Shakur

I've become passive. I don't invent, I don't yearn. I manage, I cope. — Susan Sontag

I yearn for that livin' large, but mama I ain't done yet/Sit back and watch your son rise, kick back and know your son set — J. Cole

I choose life. I choose to eat, for I yearn for something more. — Marc David

My submission to you is we're fighting the war on terror not overseas but in our own streets, and we'd be spending vast more fortunes to try to be a defensive country to protect ourselves rather than an offensive country to spread democracy wherever people yearn for it. — Johnny Isakson

Sea of Strangers In a sea of strangers, you've longed to know me. Your life spent sailing to my shores. The arms that yearn to someday hold me, will ache beneath the heavy oars. Please take your time and take it slowly; as all you do will run its course. And nothing else can take what only - was always meant as solely yours. — Lang Leav

It's not very hip to consider the plight of single women who yearn for something so old-fashioned as men. — Suzanne Fields

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. — Ludwig Von Mises

Let us live happily, without hate amongst those who hate. Let us dwell unhating amidst hateful men.
Let us live happily, in good health amongst those who are sick.
Let us dwell in good health amidst ailing men.
Let us live happily, without yearning for sensual pleasures amongst those who yearn for them.
Let us dwell without yearning amidst those who yearn.
Let us live happily, we who have no impediments. We shall subsist on joy even as the radiant gods. — Friedrich Max Muller

The most beautiful thing is that despite the shallow life we sometimes succumb to - the soul has no timeline and it knows what it wants and will yearn within until it seeks the journey — Malebo Sephodi

Nothing is more usual than the sight of old people who yearn for retirement: and nothing is so rare than those who have retired and do not regret it. — Charles De Saint-Evremond

We should remain students for lifetime. You should be ready and yearn to learn from every moment of life. The basic elements of life need to be associated with learning. The learning process should be a part of your DNA. — Narendra Modi

And it was lonely, to yearn, all alone. — Lois Lowry

Do not seek after what you yearn for, seek the source of the yearning itself. — Adyashanti

So why is a third of our world battling obesity and spending huge sums to burn off excess calories, while the other two-thirds yearn to get more of them? — Wess Stafford

We yearn for there to be meaning to our lives, balanced with a sense of inner peace & joy. — Allan Lokos

To see her is to be seduced by her. — Kamand Kojouri

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there. — James Ellroy

You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there's always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters. * — Emily Fridlund

Urban people, of course, are terribly scared nowadays. They may yearn for society, but it is risky to go around talking to strangers, for a lot of reasons, one being that people are so accustomed not to have many human contacts that they are afraid they may find out they really prefer life that way. — Russell Baker

Let Love Move You ...
If you can't stop thinking of her, it's because her essence has left an imprint on your heart ... on your soul ...
Don't be afraid of this feeling; be nourished by it ...
Let it stir your entire being ...
Let it help release your greatest self ...
Let it inspire you to be loving ... to be respectful ... to be romantic ... to be intelligent ... to be passionate ... to be a good listener ... to be appreciative ...
Let this wonderful feeling move you to become a passionate love maker ... a ravenous seducer ...
Do not be afraid of this deep love! Let it reveal the best of you ...
Let this feeling encourage you to behave in an honest and sincere manner ...
So that you may be more than a person she would settle for ... so that you may be a person she would yearn for. — Steve Maraboli

As the sea, when it lies calm and deeply transparent, yearns for heaven, so may the pure heart, when it is calm and deeply transparent, yearn for the Good. — Soren Kierkegaard

Most people live their lives as if the end were always years away. They measure their days in love, laughter, accomplishment, and loss. There are moments of sunshine and storm. There are schedules, phone calls, careers, anxieties, joys, exotic trips, favorite foods, romance, shame, and hunger. A person can be defined by clothing, the smell of his breath, the way she combs her hair, the shape of his torso, or even the company she keeps.
All over the world, children love their parents and yearn for love in return. They revel in the touch of parental hands on their faces. And even on the worst of days, each person has dreams about the future-dreams that sometimes come true.
Such is life.
Yet life can end in less time than it takes to draw one breath. — Bill O'Reilly

The Mediterranean is in my DNA. I'm fine inland for about a week, but then I yearn for a limitless view of the sea, for the colours and smells of the Italian and French Riviera. — Alain Ducasse

We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die. — David Gemmell

I have found that educators yearn to be told something like this: There will be no more initiatives - at least for a time. Instead, we will focus only on what will have an immediate and dramatic impact on learning in your classrooms: ensuring the implementation of a common, content-rich curriculum; good lessons; and plenty of meaningful literacy activities (such as close reading, writing, and discussion) across the curriculum. — Mike Schmoker

I spend a fair chunk of time in Los Angeles, and after about ten days of warmth and unbroken clear skies, you start to yearn for a bit of good old British gloom and rain! — Sean Bean

We can with confidence set a goal to make this Christmas brighter than the last and each year that follows brighter still. The trials of mortality may increase in intensity, yet for us, darkness need not increase if we focus our eyes more singly on the light that streams down on us as we follow the Master. He will lead us and help us along the path that leads upward to the home for which we yearn. — Henry B. Eyring

Always yearn to be an instrument for the Kingdom — Sunday Adelaja

If you yearn for holy felicity,
shed your arrogance and Become A Seeker Of Hearts. — Rumi

He yearned for a glimpse of her throughout the day,
Only at nights he could see her,
Be with her,
And she would be gone when he woke up. — Anonymous

I'm an old man, and I'm no warrior. But during my years watching the rise and fall of those in power, I've learned that great men do not wait for their greatness to be recognized. If you wish to have the respect that you yearn for, then you must grab it and fight anyone who would say otherwise. If you wish to be a duke, you act like a duke. If you wish to be commander-in-chief, then act like a commander-in-chief."
This was not the sort of speech that a younger Mata Zyndu, certain that each man had a proper place assigned to him in the chain of being, would have believed in. But he realized with a start that his thoughts had changed.
Didn't Kuni Garu become a duke simply by acting as one? Didn't Huno Krima become king simply by declaring that he was one? He, Mata Zyndu, heir of the proudest name in all the Islands, was a greater warrior then either of them, and yet here he sat, unhappy that people had not come to beg him to lead them. — Ken Liu

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young. — Anne Lamott

We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be. — Harold S. Kushner

I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let's peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. — Amy Poehler

I empathize with those who yearn for a simpler world, for some bygone golden age of domestic and international tranquility. But for the mass of humanity it is an age that never was. — Shirley Hufstedler

Banning not only confines one physically, it imprisons one's spirit. it induces a kind of psychological claustrophobia that makes one yearn not only for freedom of movement but spiritual escape...This insidious effect of bans was that at a certain point one began to think that the opponent was not without but within. — Nelson Mandela

... there is also an underlying, less specific fear - what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every attempt to explore it. Something is missing. — Jesse Browner

He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature ... the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile. — Nathanael West

It is a great tragedy when those who are afflicted with adversity or a source of hopelessness turn their backs on prayer. To their peril, they ignore that spiritual lifeline just at the time when their attention to it most needs to be intensified. By so doing they cut themselves of from revelation and inspiration and deprive themselves of hearing the Lord's voice. They give up the prospect of gaining the very hope and comfort for which their hearts yearn. — David S. Baxter

At that point in their lives, everything is clear an everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But , as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their destiny. — Paulo Coelho

That's how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you're right back where you started. — Paul Auster