c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
— Whittaker Chambers, Witness
I remembered Papa talking about Stalin confiscating peasants' land, tools, and animals. He told them what crops they would produce and how much they would be paid. I thought it was ridiculous. How could Stalin simply take something that didn't belong to him, something that a farmer and his family had worked their whole lives for? "That's communism, Lina," Papa had said.
— Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray
An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time
— Nicole Mones, Night in Shanghai
We have conquered everything, and everything has slipped out of our grasp.
— Victor Serge, Conquered City
In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control is now humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite countries. Still you do hear the incompetent echo in the tapped hotel telephone, you do notice that people look over their shoulders when talking in restaurants - the secret police are dormant but not forgotten; you feel in your bones, as you would a threatening change in the weather, every change in Russian mood or action. This is not and air we have ever breathed; I doubt if we would be strong enough to resist such a climate and stay as healthy in spirit as the Poles.
— Martha Gellhorn, The View from the Ground
I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology—that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. It led to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice was to hurry this dialectical process along, and allow the oppressed working classes to carry out their struggle against their bourgeois oppressors
— Steven Pinker
In this way, the Church was a true reflection of the whole of Russian society. The KGB and the Russian people had penetrated each other to such an extent that they could not be separated. The culture of betrayal and suspicion and distrust that the KGB relied on had become part of the national culture, poisoning politics in the 1990s and beyond: decades of corruption, murder and sordid sex scandals. If it cannot purge itself, however, the Russian nation will never rid itself of the illness that has driven people to alcohol. Russians need to trust each other again.
— Oliver Bullough
Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem-but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism's faith in Man.
— Whittaker Chambers, Witness
Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.P. 41
— Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.""That when you were in university, was it?"He smiled. "Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in their way?
— Iain M. Banks, Transition
Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.
— Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram
Communism,” I observed, “is a pile of wank.
— Sara Sheridan, The Pleasure Express
That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.
— John Stossel No They can t
In that instant I regretted my indiscretion, and I have never really known if it was a form of compensation of because I needed to vomit up my pent-up anger that I did something unusual for me and told him about the ups and downs my family had experienced in the previous two months since my younger brother controversially came out a homosexual. I unleashed all the resentment I felt toward my parents for having punished the kid so cruelly. As I spoke, I noted that I had been so obtuse that until that exact moment, as I confided the details and feelings I hadn't even revealed to my wife to a person I barely knew, I had concentrated my resentment on my parents' attitude because in reality I had been ignoring the true origins of what had happened: the persistence of an institutionalized homophobia, of an extended ideological fundamentalism that rejected and repressed anything different and preyed on the most vulnerable ones, on those who don't adjust to the canons of orthodoxy. Then I understood that not just my parents but I myself had been the pawn of ancestral prejudices, of the surrounding pressures of the time, and, above all, the victim of fear, as much as or more (without a doubt, more) than William. I felt a certain rancor toward my brother, precisely because it was my brother who had been declared a faggot: I could understand and even accept that two professors may have gone the other way, but this wasn't the same as knowing - and having others know - that the one who went the other way was my own brother.pp. 175-176
— Leonardo Padura, El hombre que amaba a los perros
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
— Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century
A North Korean soldier would later recall a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: If North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?
— Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Scholars and enlightened always want to define the differences between communism, socialism, fascism and other economic or political systems. It really doesn't matter to those who are subjected to those societies how someone has articulated their misery.
— Jake Danishevsky, AfterTastes and Tales from Russia
As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was acontribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.
— Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century
Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravada editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.
— Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October
The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.
— Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation
With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it.
— Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky
Communism is Christianity castrated by Ockham`s Razor.
— Israel Shamir, Masters Of Discourse
Whenever the communists are under fire, it [the term "red-baiter"] has served to divert attention from the subject matter to futile discussion of personal motives, the critic’s private life and other deliberate tricks of befuddlement.
— Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America
According to old frineds who grew up with Stanley Ann Dunham, she became a serious student of Communist and Marxist theories back in high school. One profile even named a few of her radical teachers and administrators at Mercer High, which Dunham attended, whose classrooms formed part of what was called "anarchy alley." What sounds strange is that this avante-garde, supposedly idealistic communist-thinking student of the left met a major oil company executive during the radical 1960s, and not only found him not to be a repulsively evil money-grubbing capitalist pig, but was so taken in by his Big Oil company/military charm that she married him.Okay, so maybe that's not coincidence. Maybe that's just the power of love.
— Mondo Frazier, The Secret Life of Barack Hussein Obama
Marxist Man could not have come upon the earth at a more illogical time. In an age when technological advances have finally made it feasible to adequately feed, clothe and house the entire human race, Marxist Man stands as a military threat to this peaceful achievement. His sense of insecurity drives him to demand exclusive control of human affairs in a day when nearly all other peoples would like to create a genuine United nations dedicated to world peace and world-wide prosperity. Although man can travel faster than sound and potentially provide frequent, intimate contacts between all cultures and all peoples, Marxist Man insists on creating iron barriers behind which he can secretly work.
— W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist
You don’t understand the class structure of American society," said Smetana, "or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
— Whitttaker Chambers
Socialism is a monster, which will die.
— Janusz Korwin-Mikke
I hate vodka. It is the second worst thing to have come out of Russia, after communism - which isn't Russian anyway, Karl Marx was Russian.
— Param Vyas
Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.
— Kenneth Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction
A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.
— Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within
The judicial methods used by the Communists in our day are the same as those of the Holy Inquisition. To secure the Reign of Terror, the Communists are as brutal as the Christian Church was during a long period of thirteen hundred years, for the same end. Christianity and Communism, - the Judaic Twins - in merciless brutality do not differ from each other. - The history book of the Holy Inquisition became the textbook of the Communist secret police.
— Anton U. Brown, Dignitarian Way - Criticism of Christianity, The Jews and Religion, by Great Authorities
Operating in the interstices of communist China society was at once exhilarating and uncertain. There were no rules. Or rather, there was only one rule: that nothing is allowed. But the corollary, which reveals the true genius of China’s love of the grey – in contrast to the black and white of the West – is that everything is possible. Nothing is allowed but everything is possible. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to explain what you’re doing.
— Graham Earnshaw, Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China
Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings... Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods ... What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?
— Pyotr Kropotkin
A coal miner from Chongjin whom I met in 2004 in China told me, "People are not stupid. Everybody thinks our own government is to blame for our terrible situation. We all know we think that and we all know that everybody else thinks that. We don't need to talk about it.
— Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates... Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.
— Ernesto Che Guevara
Vodka goes well with a wintery perspective. Nothing else provokes such presentiments of falling snow except, for some, the communist seizure of the state.
— Michèle Bernstein, All the King's Horses (Semiotext
One of the most ugly aspects of life in Communist China during the Mao Zedong era was the Party’s demand that people inform on each other routinely and denounce each other during political campaigns. This practice had a profoundly destructive effect on human relationships. Husbands and wives became guarded with each other, and parents were alienated from their children. The practice inhibited all forms of human contact, so that people no longer wanted to have friends. It also encouraged secretiveness and hypocrisy. To protect himself, a man had to keep his thoughts to himself. When he was compelled to speak, often lying was the only way to protect himself and his family.
— Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai
He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.
— Morris West, The Devil's Advocate
Communism, my dear," I said when I managed to get hold of a bunch of bananas for hers and let them ripen on the windowsill, given her just one each day so they'd last for a while
— Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine
For so many years, the official propaganda machinery had denounced humanitarianism as sentimental trash and advocated human relations based entirely on class allegiance. But my personal experience had shown me that most of the Chinese people remained kind, sensitive, and compassionate even though the cruel reality of the system under which they had to live compelled them to lie and pretend. Pg. 409
— Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai
As I stood in the room looking at it for the last time, I felt again the cold metal of the handcuffs on my wrists and remembered the physical suffering and mental anguish I had endured while fighting with all the willpower and intellect God had given me for that rare and elusive thing in a Communist country called justice. Pg. 351
— Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property
— John Steinbeck
In Shanghai, there were several pro-right circles of former officers. They realized that the Great War and European revolutions were a direct consequence of rotten liberalism. Words like order, family, discipline and duty didn't mean anything anymore. Civil liberties, so dear to Nina Kupina and people like her, resulted in monstrous egotism and total moral degradation: I do what I want and don't give a damn about others.
— Elvira Baryakina, White Shanghai: A Novel of the Roaring Twenties in China
...Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years.And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage.
— William S. Burroughs
Pilfering was common in Communist China’s state-owned enterprises, as the Party secretaries were slack in guarding properties that belonged to the government and poorly paid workers felt it fair compensation for their low pay. The practice was so widespread that it was an open secret. The workers joked about it and called it "Communism," which in Chinese translation means "sharing property." Pg. 390
— Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai
I am aware always that the powers that be are so strong, we can not go headlong to pit our forces, it would be suicidal, so we had that position. Which Lenin himself said that 'it is not only foolish to launch an armed revolution but it is a leftist criminal adventurism when the people are not ready to support it.' The people are not ready, they don't even understand what we are talking about.. . . Yes, even socialism is not yet understood by people, much less communism. And the rich are very afraid of communism because it means confiscation of their wealth and liquidation of their lives.
— Luis Taruc
"This compound should be available from most good drugstores." I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently............In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule.
— Andrew S. Grove
The social system of capital separates most people from the conditions of existence. This compels the vast majority to accept the mediations of work and commodity consumption in order to maintain a minimal existence at the expense of their lives, desires and dreams, of their individuality. The artificial economic scarcity imposed by capital leads to a competition that is often promoted in the United States as the basis of "individualism" in spite of the fact that it creates nearly identical mediocre existences in which life is subsumed in survival... If all individuals are indeed to be free to create their lives and relations as they desire, it is necessary to create a world in which equality of access to the means and conditions of existence is reality. This requires the total destruction of economy—the end of property, commodity exchange and work. Thus we see that the generalized realization of individual freedom goes hand-in-hands with the best aspects of the anarcho-communist ideal and can only be achieved through a revolutionary transformation.
— Wolfi Landstreicher Individualism and Communism
It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I don't approve of mixing ideologies," Ivanov continued. "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community--which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.
— Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company. Uncle Philips' views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal mattes of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engel's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.
— Paul Johnson
The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.
— Ovid, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
I wonder how much of the day I spend just callin' after you.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Some people never say the words ‘I love you’, for like a child they’re longing to be told.
— Paul Simon
I missed the sound of her shuffling her homework while I listened to music on her bed. I missed the cold of her feet against my legs when she climbed into bed.I missed the shape of her shadow where it fell across the page of my book. I missed the smell of her hair and the sound of her breath and my Rilke on her nightstand and her wet towel thrown over the back of her desk chair. It felt like I should be sated after having a whole day with her, but it just made me miss her more.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Linger
Did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there..
— Train, Train - Drops of Jupiter
I couldn't take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real.
— Laura Whitcomb, A Certain Slant of Light
God, you smell nice,” he whispered. “I've missed that smell. I've missed everything about you, little Ann.
— Wendy Higgins, Sweet Peril
Without turning on the light, I went to my bed and lay down, my arm thrown across the mattress, my hand aching because Grace wasn't underneath it
— Maggie Stiefvater, Linger
Benvolio: What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.
— Lisa See, Peony in Love
I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in the sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occured to them to do anything less then perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I Belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in teh meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans.
— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
And there you have it...if I knew that I could only have a few nights in that man's arms or nothing, I would take those magic nights and use them to keep me warm for the rest of my life.
— Karen Marie Moning, To Tame a Highland Warrior
It seemed as though he gave way all at once; he was so languid that he could not control his thoughts; they would wander to her; they would bring back the scene,- not of his repulse and rejection the day before but the looks, the actions of the day before that. He went along the crowded streets mechanically, winding in and out among the people, but never seeing them, -almost sick with longing for that one half-hour-that one brief space of time when she clung to him, and her heart beat against his-to come once again.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
Till then I wasn't alive, I longed for you like the love sick moon pulls the tide
— Corinne Bailey Rae
Erotic longing is really a longing to merge with something greater than oneself. For every kind of love is a force that holds the promise of taking us beyond the limitations of our individual lives.
— Julianne Davidow
In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.
— Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
You can miss a person you've never known.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
But she had dreamed of being his for too long. He had quite ruined her for a marriage of convenience. She wanted everything from him: his mind, his body, his name and, most of all, his heart.
— Sarah MacLean, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake
I kept it to remind me that although there is evil, there is sometimes beauty and light. You, Jillian. You were always my light.
— Karen Marie Moning, To Tame a Highland Warrior
...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.
— Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
If your heart is broken, do you have a phantom heart?
— Damon Suede, Hot Head
I miss you every second of every minute, every minute of every hour, every hour of everyday.
— Shanece
In the end, the train stood 2 hours motionless in the middle of nowhere.Every minute seemed like an eternity.Time felt crept by slowly, with clear malice towards me. All I could do was grip my teeth and try to hold back my tears...Akari... Please, don't wait for me...If you'd just go home.
— Makoto Shinkai, 5 Centimeters per Second
Never let the meaning of your love light escape to the dark nothingness of oblivion.
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
I know she is coming I know she will look And that is the longing And this is the book.
— Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing
Something strange started to rage inside me, hearing you inhale sharply as I tried to kiss those scars away or etch them deeper into your skin, wanting to mark you in an entirely different way.
— D.S. Wrights, The Beast In Me
Jack is somewhere in this city, right now. The thought was like passing by a house where someone was grilling in the back yard. You could smell it, but it wasn't yours, and you couldn't just barge into their home and demand a burger, no matter how your mouth watered.
— Jane Seville, Zero at the Bone
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
And how do you really feel?Like I'll never recover. Like I'll never draw another breath without half of it being a wish for him.
— Jane Seville, Zero at the Bone
How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end.
— Allegra Goodman, The Cookbook Collector
Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?
— André Gide, Urien’s Voyage
I call him my friend, but in the last year it's seemed too casual a word for what Gale is to me. A pang of longing shoots through my chest. If only he was with me now! But of course, I don't want that. I don't want him in the arena where he'd be dead in a few days. I just... I just miss him. And I hate being so alone. Does he miss me? He must.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.
— Meindert DeJong, The Little Cow and the Turtle
But why, she thought wryly, did a man seem more attractive as he became less available? How humbling to think one had so much in common with a cow stretching its neck through a gate for better grass.
— Mary Jo  Putney, The Bargain
Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding.
— Daphne du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories
...and I suddenly feel that Henry is there, incredible need for Henry to be there and to put his hand on me even while it seems to me that Henry is the rain and I am alone and wanting him- Clare
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.
— Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973
It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
The saints are little pieces of mystical Christ, sick of love for union. The wife of youth, that wants her husband some years, and expects he shall return to her from oversea lands, is often on the shore; every ship coming near shore is her new joy; her heart loves the wind that shall bring him home. She asks at every passenger news: "Oh! saw ye my husband? What is he doing? When shall he come? Is he shipped for a return?" Every ship that carrieth not her husband, is the breaking of her heart. What desires hath the Spirit and Bride to hear, when the husband Christ shall say to the mighty angels, "Make you ready for the journey; let us go down and divide the skies, and bow the heaven: I will gather my prisoners of hope unto me; I can want my Rachel and her weeping children no longer. Behold, I come quickly to judge the nations." The bride, the Lamb's wife, blesseth the feet of the messengers that preach such tidings, "Rejoice, O Zion, put on thy beautiful garments; thy King is coming." Yea, she loveth that quarter of the sky, that being rent asunder and cloven, shall yield to her Husband, when he shall put through his glorious hand, and shall come riding on the rainbow and clouds to receive her to himself.
— Samuel Rutherford, The Trial and Triumph of Faith
A line from The Picture of Dorian Gray kept running through my head- a line which, I thought, might have been written by the Devil himself:"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.
— Syrie James, Dracula, My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker
Verlange. The process feels like crossing a border on a one-way ticket, from a state of innocence, to one of irreconcilable knowledge. You are in a new country. But no one wants to live here. The visas are assigned by some obscure system nobody can comprehend.
— Karina Szczurek, The Fifth Mrs Brink: A Memoir
The correspondence testifies to the frailty of human longings, to the process of how something precious can turn fatal, a reality become illusion. We are reminded that love should be cherished when it comes your way, because no matter in what form it arrives, carrying no matter what baggage in its fragile beautiful hands, you should welcome it and protect it from the harshness of this world.
— Karina Szczurek, The Fifth Mrs Brink: A Memoir
Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.
— Yōko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
I couldn't reach him from here even if I tried.
— Yōko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
…The love of his youthAppeared as in a dreamAnd this ageing loverWent mad with love.The youth robbed him ofReason and his chastity.In pursuit of his Beloved, mad, deranged,He was from kith and kin estranged.The fire of the rose’s cheekBurnt the nightingale’s heart;The laughing flameTormented the devoted moth…
— Hafiz Shirazi
Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.
— Catherine Lacey, The Answers
It occurs to me that I really can't remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see.
— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
There are things that will not have themselves buried and put out of sight, as though they had never been.
— Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington
Please wait for me. Don't have all the fun now. Don't fill up on other people who aren't me. Don't ruin your appetite.
— Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl
This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. It is the same as that on the preceding page, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory. It is here that the little prince appeared on Earth, and disappeared.Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognise it in case you travel some day to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
As he walked past the newsstand, he couldn't help sniffing the air, searching for hints of bacon, coconut, and vanilla. Combined with John's declaration that he needed to get laid, he couldn't get that smell off his mind, or her adorable freckles, or the broken expression on her face as she blew past him on the sidewalk. Such a marvelous creature deserved someone who understood her talents- someone like him, perhaps.
— Amy E. Reichert, The Coincidence of Coconut Cake
I hated longing. I hated it almost as much as I hated pining. It sapped the mind of good judgment, filled the heart with achiness, and distracted the vagina from other potential conquests.
— Penny Reid, Love Hacked
He thought there must be a place, like a dead-letter office, where everyone's longing went, yearning that was sent out, day after day. He thought it must collect somewhere, in a dank basement room, the mass of it rising and rising like water, and with no end in sight.
— Jane Hamilton, The Short History of a Prince
The heartbeat of God burns with longing for the redemption of every individual
— Sunday Adelaja
In the Village IIIWho has removed the typewriter from my desk,so that I am a musician without his pianowith emptiness ahead as clear and grotesqueas another spring? My veins bud, and I am sofull of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.The notes outside are visible; sparrows willline antennae like staves, the way springs were,but the roofs are cold and the great grey riverwhere a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,moves imperceptibly like the accumulatingyears. I have no reason to forgive herfor what I brought on myself. I am past hating,past the longing for Italy where blowing snowabsolves and whitens a kneeling mountain rangeoutside Milan. Through glass, I am waitingfor the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginningof spring, but my hands, my work, feel strangewithout the rusty music of my machine. No wordsfor the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mangeof old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.
— Derek Walcott
The RemoteI often think about youwhen I’m lying alone inmy room with my mouthopen and the remotelost somewhere in the bed.
— Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing
How could I want one thing so much and its exact opposite at the same time?
— Kate Mildenhall, Skylarking
What, and end up like you? Wistfully recalling a lover from long ago? Please.
— Elizabeth Carlton, The Royal Rogue
The sensation Ihad experienced vanished like smoke from a snuffed candle, leaving behind wisps of namelesslonging.
— Julianne Donaldson, Edenbrooke
All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.
— C.S. Lewis
Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.
— Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love
And I wanted Jordan, because if he wanted me back it would mean I wasn't ordinary. A guy like him wouldn't settle for that.
— Vikki Wakefield, All I Ever Wanted
I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.
— Cormac McCarthy, Whales and Men
I didn't want this dance to end, or Kiggs to let go of my hand. I didn't want him to turn his eyes away, or live any other moment than this one.
— Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
I was like a ten-year-old kid who had been scraped off a mother's love so sudden and surreal that I kept hoping I could chant a few magical words and slowly, Mama Jas would materialise in front of me.
— Diyar Harraz, Like The Starlings
She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again.
— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The sensation I had experienced vanished like smoke from a snuffed candlem, leaving behind wisps of nameless longing.
— Julianne Donaldson, Edenbrooke
If you do not want to write, at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and send it to me. You are not taking any notice of me at all. God forgive you – all I wanted was a few words from you.
— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.
— J.M. Coetzee
Wait,” he said, and he had his hand outstretched toward me, fingertips just brushing the sleeve of my sweatshirt, gently rooting me to the spot. I wanted to shrug him off, but at the same time, I wanted to fall against him and bury my face in his shoulder. I wanted to commiserate about what had just happened, and make sure he was okay, and discuss how Stanton really is psychotic. I did none of the above.
— Emma Mills, First & Then
you’re gone andyour unfinished poemlies alone on my desk—empty of tears,I only hope it rains today
— John J. Geddes
He is on his way to her. In a moment he will leave the wooden sidewalks and vacant lots for the paved streets. The small suburban houses flash by like the pages of a book, not as when you turn them over one by one with your forefinger but as when you hold your thumb on the edge of the book and let them all swish past at once. The speed is breathtaking. And over there is her house at the far end of the street, under the white gap in the rain clouds where the sky is clearing, toward the evening. How he loves the little houses in the street that lead to her! He could pick them up and kiss them! Those one-eyed attics with their roofs pulled down like caps. And the lamps and icon lights reflected in the puddles and shining like berries! And her house under the white rift of the sky! There he will again receive the dazzling, God-made gift of beauty from the hands of its Creator. A dark muffled figure will open the door, and the promise of her nearness, unowned by anyone in the world and guarded and cold as a white northern night, will reach him like the first wave of the sea as you run down over the sandy beach in the dark.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
He breathes in deep, then lets it go with a shaky gust. “I hate this. I hate it so much.” His grip makes my ribs protest, and his voice goes rough. “I feel like some essential organ is being ripped from me.
— Kristen Callihan, The Game Plan
i never knew that the things i left unsaidmade the loudest noise in her heart
— Aditya Kandari
For some reason, she thought of how the old people wept when they played fado music at the annual Portuguese Festival. Saudade , her great-aunt Del called it: homesick music. But according to her father, the emotion was about more than place. It was a profound longing for everything that was lost and would never be regained.
— Patry Francis, The Orphans of Race Point
If i think about us logically, there is no chance for us. But logic doesn't produce magic.
— Cristian Peter Marinescu-Ivan
If I had one night, I'd hold you in my arms,Find redemption, no more contention,Keeping you close. Too long, years gone,Wasted away. One night, our night,Remember this. I won't forget you,No I won't forget you.—Red-Eyed Loons
— Liza M. Wiemer, Hello?
The voice of the waves was now mixed with strange sounds; laughter, running feet and the clanging of great bells far out to sea. Snufkin lay still and listened. dreaming and remembering his trip round world. Soon I must set out again, he thought. But not yet.
— Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll
Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?
— Greta Garbo
A chaotic mix of emotions churned inside him. Relief. Anger. Longing. She was the last person in the world he wanted to see. She was the only person in the world he wanted to see.
— Laura  Oliva, Season Of The Witch
We look before and after, And pine for what is not:Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.Yet if we could scornHate, and pride, and fear;If we were things bornNot to shed a tear,I know not how thy joy we everShould come near.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Skylark and Adonais - With Other Poems
... and you start telling a story about accidentally stealing shoes from an outlet and we've been on the steps for almost twenty minutes and you're so nervous and excited that you keep talking about shoes as if you have to keep talking about shoes or you might jump me right here, on the steps. I chose this spot because my whole fucking life I've walked by these steps and seen couples that make me feel alone, rejected. And now there are loners passing by you and me, jealous, and you're still talking and fuck, it's hard to listen when I can smell your body wash.
— Caroline Kepnes, You
30 cents, two transfers, loveThinking hard about you I got on the bus and paid 30 cents car fare and asked the driver for two transfers before discovering that I was alone.
— Richard Brautigan
Now you can all have a wish -- the Moomin family first!"Moominmamma hesitated a bit. "Should it be something you can see?" she asked, "or an idea? If you know what I mean, Mr. Hobgoblin?""Oh, yes!" said the Hobgoblin. "Things are easier of course, but it will work with an idea too.""Then I want to wish that Moomintroll will stop missing Snufkin," said Moominmamma."Oh, dear!" said Moomintroll going pink, "I didn't know it was so obvious!"But the Hobgoblin waved his cloak once, and immediately the sadness flew out of Moomintroll's heart. His longing just became an expectancy, and that felt much better.
— Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll
In his heart, some tiny piece of what hadn't happened would lodge.
— Simon Van Booy