"Yearning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drawings of the spirit—stronger than chains of triple steel—that thirst of the heart for pure domestic joy, which the foaming goblet can never quench—that immortal longing which rises up from the lowest abysses of sin, that yearning for pardon which stirred the bosom of the Hebrew prodigal, constrained the transgressing Louis to burst asunder the bonds of iniquity, and return to his ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... universal craving after an ideal; the yearning for something beyond the sordid realities of animal existence and of daily life; to comfort, ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... inoculation. This fact, absolutely material, furnishes a post-discovered material basis for a pre-surmised moral concept,—the "oneness of flesh" with father and mother. Thus science solidifies a poetic-moral yearning, once held imprisoned in the benumbing shell of theological dogma, and reflects its morality in the poetic expression of the monogamic family. The moral, as well as the material, accretions of the race's intellect, since it uncoiled out of early Communism, bar, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... island for sale, they have only been able to dispose of their own characters. The people have not debased themselves. In the lying homage to the Queen of England they took no part. They have preserved through the severest trials the old immortal yearning of their race, and the arms they had provided themselves with in '48 they have guarded religiously, in the hope of using them on some day of ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... A wild yearning cry full of despair arose at this, but the master's words went home, and the next minute the hurried scrambling of feet was heard, as women, carrying their children, began to climb up the sides of the vale, dragged and pushed up by the menfolk, in whose faces were seen reflected the looks ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... you and GOT you, and there's the proof of it on your wrists this minute. I won. Do you concede that? You must be fair, old top, because this is the last big game I'll ever play." There was a break, a yearning that was almost plaintive, in ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... heavily with character—like a volcano smouldering beneath its lava. For many years he has managed the Bigelow House, with his thoughts apart from it, his eyes ever seeking the horizon that recedes beyond the soaring rim of our encircling cup of hills, his heart forever yearning forth to the outer world; which he erroneously conceives to be a theatre of events—as if outside of Radville only could there be things worth seeing, considering, or doing, or matters of any sort that move ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... who, being an Orleanist, had listened to Graham's speech with an approving smile,—"and if I remember right, my dear De Breze, no one was more brilliantly severe than yourself on poor De Lamartine and the Republic that succeeded Louis Philippe; no one more emphatically expressed the yearning desire for another Napoleon to restore order at home and renown abroad. Now you have got ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such scenes, as are never garnered up in the breasts of happy childhood, shadowed his face and heart. His short-lived happiness was over. He made no reply to his brother, but sat motionless, gazing at the sky with a searching, yearning, far-off gaze. Looking at the two young faces turned upward, it would have been hard to say which was the saddest. Young as they were, traces of the working of the curse which had blighted their lives, were plainly visible in both. Both were equally ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... listened, and thought with yearning anguish of his sofa. He scanned the lady viciously, felt her masculine tenor thumping on his eardrums, understood nothing, ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... hosts of dancing stars. Bright under its limpid waters gleam the towers of many a 'sunken city.' Strong and clear through the night-silence of eager listening, ring the chimes of their far-off bells, the echoes of joyous laughter: and to waiting, yearning ones come, ever and anon, deep glances from gleaming eyes, warm graspings from outstretched hands. And well windeth the river into grim old caves, and even the merriest boat that King Cole ever launched flitteth by the dark doors, intent only on the brilliant chateaux, that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the meantime, had been living passively on the most affectionate terms with her brother and sister, and though often secretly yearning after the dear old father, whose darling she had been, and longing for power of usefulness, she took it on trust that her present lot had been ordered for her, and was thankful, like the bird of Dr. May's ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... it, that, with one accord, they got rid of all yearning after the large sum which the doctor was so anxious to procure for them, and looked forward to a life of great happiness and contentment. On the whole, too, when they came to talk the matter over quietly among themselves, they ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... more wild and independent of fact until the little girls quivered with yearning terror and the boys burnished up forgotten cap pistols. He told of lions, tigers, elephants, bears, and buffaloes, all of enormous size and strength of lung, so that before many days had passed he had debarred himself, by whole-hearted lying, from the very possibility ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Eckhart and Tauler. Men who called themselves Christians had been taught, and had brought themselves to believe, that to read the writings of the Apostles was a deadly sin. Yet in secret they were yearning after that forbidden Bible. They knew that there were translations, and though these translations had been condemned by popes and synods, the people could not resist the temptation of reading them. In 1373, we find the first ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the Communist empire has been heightened by two other formidable forces. One is the historical force of nationalism—and the yearning of all men to be free. The other is the gross inefficiency of their economies. For a closed society is not open to ideas of progress—and a police state finds that it cannot ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... wore brown clothes, and whose employment in a bank prevented him from going abroad for his health. These people were well enough, but they were not for her. She seemed to see beyond London, beyond the seas, whither she could not say, and she could not quell the yearning which rose to her lips like a ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... are represented as too keen. Of George Eliot's types of adolescent character, this may best be seen in Maggie Tulliver, with her enthusiastic self-renunciation, with "her volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions," with her "wide, hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth," and in Gwendolen, who, from the moment she caught Deronda's eye, was "totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person of the other sex whom she had never seen before." There was "the ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the contents of the sutlers' stores, containing an amount and variety of property such as they had never conceived. Then came a storming charge of men rushing in a tumultuous mob over each other's heads, under each other's feet, anywhere, everywhere, to satisfy a craving stronger than a yearning for fame. There were no laggards in that charge, and there was abundant evidence of the fruits of victory. Men ragged and famished clutched tenaciously at whatever came in their way, whether of clothing ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the physical yearning for such comforts, a considerable section of intelligent and virtuous women insist on picturing to themselves that the reign of physical force is over, or as good as over; that distinctions based upon ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... because he looked as though she had hurt him so—his face more like a beautiful cameo than ever, pure and sharp; he who was so debonair and generous with them all, genial toward them always, and familiar with the simplest and poorest. She longed impulsively to take him to her heart, to give him with yearning tenderness the one caress he had pleaded for: but, still seeing dimly where he was blind, ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... left, the king once more abandons himself to his yearning for his beloved. "Would that she came from behind and put her lotos hands over my eyes." Urvasi hears the words and fulfils his wish. He knows who it is, for every little hair on his body stands up straight. "Do not consider me forward if now I embrace his body," ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... harsh. Johnson has observed truly enough, 'Honesty is not necessarily greater where elegance is less'; nor does a sense of supreme or despotic power necessarily imply the exercise or abuse of it. Princes have, happily, the same yearning as the peasant after the respect and affection of the circle around them, and the people under them; and they must generally seek it ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... and the methods which they discovered of acquiring the earth's treasures, are connected with this peculiarity of their nature. There was no danger of their turning their backs upon the "illusion" of the physical senses in their yearning after the supersensible, but rather of their entirely severing the connection of their souls with the supersensible world, through their appreciation for the ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... blessed name of mother. Oh, in woman How mighty is the love of offspring! Ere Unto her wond'ring, untaught mind unfolds The myst'ry that is half divine, half human, Of life and birth, the love of unborn souls Within her, and the mother-yearning creeps Through her warm heart, and stirs its hidden deeps, And grows and strengthens with each ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... yearning for financial independence, obsessed by the desire to escape from the dirt and disorder and confusion about ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... therefore restless, dissatisfied ultimately with all that is not it. "The eye is not filled with sight nor the ear with hearing," for in us there is the capacity, and therefore, in our best moments, the yearning to see and hear something which sense can never give. Greater than all that is here, in silent moments, when the senses are tired and disappointment steals over us, the truth of the insignificance of things bursts upon us. "Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... surprised in her face a change; a look of infinite wistfulness and tenderness, the yearning of the eternal mother that rises in every true woman when she gazes upon the child that might have been her own; and suddenly a great longing surged over his soul and mastered him for the moment. But the baby was lisping ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in calling man to the great task-field of duty, has not mocked him with the mournful necessity of laboring in vain. We have been pained more than words can express to see young, generous hearts, yearning with strong desires to consecrate themselves to the cause of their fellow-men, checked and chilled by the ridicule of worldly-wise conservatism, and the solemn rebukes of practical infidelity in the guise of a piety which professes to love the unseen Father, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... around, and looked at Julia Cloud, saw the white, strained look around her lips, the yearning light in her eyes, and had some swift man's intuition about the true woman's soul of her. For men, especially young men, do have these intuitions ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... was the one that was sick. You see, I wanted to get Pa into the church again, and get him to stop drinking, so I got a boy to write a letter to him, in a female hand, and sign the name of a choir singer Pa was mashed on, and tell him she was yearning for him to come back to the church, and that the church seemed a blank without his smiling face, and benevolent heart, and to please come back for her sake. Pa got the letters Saturday night and he seemed tickled, ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... cleared; in the west shone a faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star. Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city like the pulsing heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he seemed to feel the whole vast stretch of the continent throbbing; the yearning breast of the land trembling with energy; the great arch of sky, spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power unused. The murmur of little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the footbeat of men on the pavements of ten ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... with a wavering recognition. "Ah, it is you, Tom," he said, and there was a yearning in his voice that fell like a gulf between him and the man who was not his son. At the moment it came to Nicholas with a great bitterness that his share of the judge's heart was the share of an outsider—the crumbs that fall to the beggar that ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... and his dead throat to speak? Surely some elder singer would arise, Whose harp hath leave to threaten and to mourn Above this people when they go astray. Is Whitman, the strong spirit, overworn? Has Whittier put his yearning wrath away? I will not and I dare not yet believe! Though furtively the sunlight seems to grieve, And the spring-laden breeze Out of the gladdening west is sinister With sounds of nameless battle overseas; Though when we turn and question ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... of the unfortunate, who works a slow but inevitable retribution, took into his hands the winding up of this affair. The prince's days of passion were over; humanity gradually resumed its sway over him as his hair whitened with age. At the brink of the grave he felt a yearning towards the friend of his early youth. In order to repay, as far as possible, the gray-headed old man, for the injuries which had been heaped upon the youth, the prince, with friendly expressions, invited the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... love. And the book reveals one of the most miserable and dissatisfied men that ever walked the earth, seeking peace in solitude and virtue, while yielding to unrestrained impulses; a man of morbid sensibility, ever yearning for happiness and pursuing it by impossible and impracticable paths. No sadder autobiography has ever been written. It is a lame and impotent attempt at self-justification, revealing on every page the writer's distrust of the virtues which he exalts, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... than all the maidens who look at themselves in the Nile. Thy hair is blacker than the feathers of a raven, thy eyes have a milder glance than the eyes of a deer which is yearning for its fawn. Thy stature is the stature of a palm, and the lotus envies thee thy charm. Thy bosoms are like grape clusters with the juice of ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... words meant only to deceive; I have to thee my inmost heart reveal'd. And doth no inward voice suggest to thee, How I with yearning soul must pine to see My father, mother, and my long-lost home? Oh let thy vessels bear me thither, king! That in the ancient halls, where sorrow still In accents low doth fondly breathe my name, Joy, as in welcome of a new-born child, May round the columns twine the fairest wreath. Thou wouldst ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... this airy sprite, the beholder feels an exhilarating influence steal over him, and involuntarily there goes up from his heart, like incense, that yearning prayer: ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... other hand, Mary was, as usual, seeking and recovering the balance of her startled spirits in her own chamber. She saw the matter wisely and simply, and had full confidence in Louis, with such a yearning for his protection that, it may be, the strange suddenness of the proposal cost her the less. She came forth and announced her intention to Mrs. Willis, who was inclined to resent it as derogatory to the dignity of womanhood, and the privileges of a bride; but Mary smiled and answered that, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said, regarding him with a look which seemed to devour him with yearning love. "This world whose voices thee hears calling is a fiction of thine own brain. That which thee thinks thee beholds of glory and beauty thee hast conjured up from the depths of a youthful and disordered fancy, and ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... wants, cannot shine in society, or secure a college education or a large fortune,—all of which minister to our insistent and rarely satisfied instinct of self-assertion,—or if he is secretly yearning for the satisfaction of the marriage relation, or for the sense of completion in parenthood; then the tension from these unsatisfied desires shows itself in a hundred little everyday instances of lack of self-control. These mystify him and ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... reflective thought which was the mark of that age. Even so Tennyson himself, as he passed from youth to middle life, and from that to old age, was ever trying to achieve one more 'work of noble note', and yearning ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... he stood, his hand on his horse's withers. How noble he looked! And a great yearning came over her. To throw her arms round his neck once, and then to stab herself, and set him free, dying, as she ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... Mowbray had never hazarded his luck with Lord Etherington, except for trifling stakes; but his conceit led him to suppose that he now fully understood his play, and, agreeably to the practice of those who have habituated themselves to gambling, he had every now and then felt a yearning to try for his revenge. He wished also to be out of Lord Etherington's debt, feeling galled under a sense of pecuniary obligation, which hindered his speaking his mind to him fully upon the subject of his flirtation ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company, joy was rampant. Bryce Cardigan was doing a buck and wing dance around the room, while Moira McTavish, with her back to her tall desk, watched him, in her eyes a tremendous joy and a sweet, yearning glow of adoration that Bryce was too ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... stern orders of military rule. A shade passes over the brow of the youthful-looking soldier as he dons his scarlet uniform. His thoughts are not at ease. Guy Trevelyan feels a vague and unaccountable yearning—an undefined feeling which is impossible to shake off. "Well, Trevelyan," soliloquized he; "you are a strange old fellow; such a state as this must not be indulged amidst the stir and hurly-burly of to-night. I believe bedlam has broken loose." No wonder ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... the cub pilot came from the captain's room with some word to Gilmore, who, though yearning to stay, left him and Ned and hastened back ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... returning wistfully From birdlike wand'rings, ever come to rest, On fostering hand on tender cheek or breast; The upturned eyes, with loving certainty Seek ever the grave face where broodingly, The mother-soul by yearning love opprest, With wings down-drooped, seems folded o'er the nest Where lies the Hope of all humanity. And she His World, and He her Calvary,— He wraps her round with all the mystery Of love predestined ...
— The Angel of Thought and Other Poems - Impressions from Old Masters • Ethel Allen Murphy
... one would think, who is not caught up into a mood of comradeship and self-suppression which amounts almost to exaltation. Not one but has to fight through moods almost reaching extinction of the very love of life. And shall all this—and the many hard disappointments, and the long yearning for home and those he loves, and the chafing against continual restraints, and the welling-up of secret satisfaction in the "bit done," the knowledge that Fate is not beating, cannot beat him; and ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Lord God shall bestow, be it honour or death. No heart for the harp has he, nor for acceptance of treasure, No pleasure has he in a wife, no delight in the world, Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing, A yearning uneasiness hastens ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... I'm not one of that lot," said Toby, between his set teeth, since his heart had long been yearning for a chance to shine on the gridiron as a particular star, to hear the roar of plaudits from the vast crowd assembled, when fortune allowed him to make some sensational play that would advance his ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... faint waning light, through which the snow gleamed strangely, mother and son sat talking. Lady Earle told Ronald of his father's death—of the last yearning cry when all the pent-up love of years seemed to rush forth and overpower him with its force. It was some comfort to him, after all, that his father's last thoughts and last ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... Heaven is Love—and though its name Has been usurped by passion, and profaned To its unholy uses through all time, Still, the external principle is pure; And in these deep affections that we feel Omnipotent within us, can we see The lavish measure in which love is given. And in the yearning tenderness of a child For every bird that sings above its head, And every creature feeding on the hills, And every tree and flower, and running brook, We see how everything was made to love, And how they err, who, in a world like this, Find anything ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... left, unto their homes returning, With musing step, trace o'er each by-gone scene; And they upon their journey—doth no yearning, No backward glance, revert to what ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... strong and clear brained, and who really cared for her. But who did care for her? Perhaps for the first time in her life she was the victim of sentimentality, of what she would have thought of certainly as sentimentality in another. A sort of yearning for affection came to her. A wave of self-pity swept over her. Her independence of spirit was in abeyance or dead. Arabian, it seemed, had struck her down to the ground. She felt humiliated, terrified, and strangely, horribly young, like a child almost who had been cruelly ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... once in her life his daughter did not chide him. Instinctively she felt the power of the great tenderness and yearning in his breast that had impelled him to come, and, so far as any word of disapproval ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... have been very lonely, I expect, for I began to feel so. When you come to your own door, Tom, home looks cheerless if there is no bright eye to welcome you, and the older a man gets the more he feels that he was not intended to live single. My yearning after something to love and to love me, which is in our nature, was satisfied, first by having Bessy, and then ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... have been said of him that he was seeking the realization of an ideal, yet to one's amazement our very ideals change at times and leave us floundering in the dark. What is an ideal, anyhow? A wraith, a mist, a perfume in the wind, a dream of fair water. The soul-yearning of a girl like Antoinette Nowak was a little too strained for him. It was too ardent, too clinging, and he had gradually extricated himself, not without difficulty, from that particular entanglement. Since then he had been intimate with other women for brief periods, but to no great satisfaction—Dorothy ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of Mercy! whom the world sneers at as "old maids," if you pour out on cats and dogs and parrots a little of the love that is yearning to spend itself on children of your own. As long as such as you walk this lower world one needs no Butler's Analogy to prove to us that there is another world, where such as you will have a fuller and a fairer (I dare not ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... would it be when she traveled alone! On the continent, too! Oh, she would have liked to be a good little wife! But, as that could not be, better go back to her Pa and Ma and have a home, a real one, with a servant in it. She was yearning for a home. But how would she be received in that case? Would they put the blame on her? Had they forgiven her? Had she a Pa and Ma still? That was what she ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... her friends in the drawing-room apparently as serenely happy as her wont, but through all the afternoon and evening her heart was with her little one in her banishment and grief, yearning over her with tenderest ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... sense— odd as it may seem—was one of infinite protection. It seemed impossible that, with all these cheerful men about me, joking and swearing, I could come to much harm. It surprised me, after my months of yearning and weeks of tramping to reach this army, to discover how little my presence was regarded even in my own regiment. The men took me for granted, asking no questions. I might have strolled in upon them out of nowhere, with my hands in my pockets. And the officers, it appeared, ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... love affair and marriage. But the healing that either could give was at best transitory. There remained to him as a poet of genius one resource. He could gratify his own burning desire for a pure and unselfish love by living in his mighty imagination the lives of his characters. "He who in his yearning for the highest joys of love had been compelled to abandon hope, found a joy mingled with pain, in giving of his life to lovers in whom the longing of William Shakespeare lives ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... appeal was disconcerting to Joe. How could he tell her that he had not understood her striving and yearning to reach him, and that at last understanding, he had been appalled by the enormity of his own heart's desire. He said nothing for a little while, but took her by one tear-wet hand and led her away from the door. Near the table he ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... silent again with a still, far-away look of fierce yearning after that missed distinction, with his nostrils for an instant dilated, sniffing the intoxicating breath of that wasted opportunity. If you think I was either surprised or shocked you do me an injustice in more ways than one! Ah, he was an imaginative beggar! He would ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... greater than when Waltheof smote the Normans in the gate at York. Swegen and his successor Harold were dead. Cnut the Saint reigned in Denmark, the son-in-law of Robert of Flanders. This alliance with William's enemy joined with his remembrance of his own two failures to stir up the Danish king to a yearning for some exploit in England. English exiles were still found to urge him to the enterprise. William's conquest had scattered banished or discontented Englishmen over all Europe. Many had made their way to the Eastern Rome; they had joined the Warangian guard, ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... depth of science, and the penetration to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been enrolled in the guilds of the learned, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... aspiration. He tried to make each line beautiful and firm and swift and pure. When he succeeded, he felt within him the bubbling of a sweet contentment. This would be followed by dissatisfaction, renewed yearning—and he ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... every word which fell from his lips, and every demonstration of sympathy and approbation with which you received his eloquent expressions, renders me unable to respond to his kindness, and leaves me at last all heart and no lips, yearning to respond as I would do to your cordial greeting—possessing, heaven knows, the will, and desiring only to find ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... upon him with a look of yearning tenderness which, even if the room had been less dimly lighted, he would not have seen. He was not much in the habit of looking for ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... But parents have a right to show a terrible anger when thwarted by their children, and in this case the father too much resembled the son in wilful impetuosity of temper. Turned out of his first home, Shelley went wandering forth by land and sea,—a reed shaken by the wind, a restless outcast yearning for repose and human sympathy, and in this way encountering the questionable accidents of his troubled, unguarded life, and gathering all the feverish inspiration of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... this nook of the south. Harry's father had a family affection for his place, and, doubtless, Harry entertained it also, undeveloped as yet, but to grow and acquire full maturity one day, addressing him at every pensive interval with a vain craving and yearning. And, again, in the confusion and distraction of Mrs. Jardine's feelings, there was her sister Anne haunting her dreams, and reproaching her with having forgotten her; and lastly, one verse in her well-worn ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... with another fellow-clerk who was named Spooner, as well as most of our men, were from "the old country," where we had left fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters—in some cases sweethearts—behind us. It may be conceived then with what anxiety and yearning we looked forward to the periodical break in the weary six months of total silence that had enveloped us. Men in civilised, or even semi-civilised communities, cannot understand this. Convicts on penal servitude for long periods may have some faint notion of it, but even these have periods ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the yearning husband, and apologized by a laugh. The Doctor grunted, looked out of the carriage window, and, suddenly ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... conflict between a father's pride and his yearning to see his only son safely delivered from constant deadly peril. They spoke of Aline. Not for the first time; Scipion, unaware that the good father was her confessor also, had told him before of his son's hopeless love, to ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... They nag, harrass, and suppress. The business of the teacher is to make the student see visions of beauty, truth and love, to open up to him these mighty fields that he may go in and possess them. To implant a yearning, an unquenchable, all-consuming desire to comprehend and to express the emotions of which his teacher ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... amusement in which his health prevented his participation. There is a period in youth when the affections feel as a strong necessity, the desire for sympathy, when love is yet a stranger, and friendship is as intense as passion. Dearer than any after friend, is the one who first fills this yearning vacancy; and though as time wears on, and separation follows, that tie may be broken never to be re-knit, there is a halo around it still, and it is made almost holy by the blended tints of hope and trust, and tenderness, that, with reflected light, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... in his early days gave auguries of great powers. The boy whose strong arm could fling a stone across the Rappahannock; whose strong will could tame the most fiery horse; whose just spirit made him the umpire of his fellows; whose obedient heart bowed to a mother's yearning for her son and laid down the midshipman's warrant in the British Navy which answered his first ambitious dream; the student transcribing mathematical problems, accounts, and business forms, or listening to the soldiers and seamen of vessels in the river as ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... is a strange thing to go to the Casinos and see the coarse whores and apprentices in bespattered morning dresses, pea-jackets, and bonnets, twirl round clumsily and indecently to the divine airs played in the Gallery; 'the music yearning like a God in pain' indeed. I should like to hear some of your Florentine Concerts; and I do wish you to believe that I do constantly wish myself with you: that, if I ever went anywhere, I would assuredly go to visit the Villa Gondi. I wish you to believe ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... eyes looking out to sea she felt an extraordinary yearning to hold something of her very own tight to her bosom. Rose was slender, and as reserved in figure as in character, yet she felt a queer sensation of—how could she describe it?—bosom. There was something about San Salvatore that made her feel all bosom. She wanted to gather to her bosom, to comfort ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... beauty! What is it to the purpose to put its semblance into words? Its significance is the heart of the matter. We see the earth as hill and valley, pasture and cloud, sky and sea. Really it is nothing of the kind, but infinitely more. It is tireless energy, yearning, force, profusion, terror, immutability in variety. What are words to such a power? It is to that I stretch out my arms. I must lie folded in that immensity, drown and sink in it, till it and I are one. I must be ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... and in poverty, when all extraneous sources of consolation were denied them, those who if still plunged in pleasure and splendour might have remained insensible to the blessings of family ties, now turned to them with the yearning fondness with which a last comfort is clasped, and became sensible how little they had hitherto ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... were few, and were mainly centred upon their pensioners amongst the poor. Their friends were of their own generation. Thus in the past Claudia had not felt any eager yearning for the house in St. John's Wood, where the sisters dwelt at peace. But it was otherwise now, because Claudia had ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... at once and returned to her seat; then sat listening—her yearning eyes fixed upon his bowed head. He had momentarily forgotten what the events of that night had cost her; so also had she. Her only thought was of ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... yearning, however, entirely on the side and within those hours consecrated to the law. In his wife's society he yearned not at all. In her company he carefully kept his thoughts and his language inside the innermost circle ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... abandon the search. In the interim, the lady will have cooled. Walks upon the sea-shore are uncommonly dull without something like reciprocal sentimentality. The odds are, that the old aunt is addicted to snuff, tracts, and the distribution of flannel, and before August, the fair Dorothea will be yearning for a sight of her adorer. You can easily gammon Anthony Whaup into a loan of that yacht of his which he makes such a boast of; and if you go prudently about it, and flatter him on the score of his steering, I haven't the least doubt that he will victual his hooker ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... wind-blown castle, its unseen occupants, its midnight music, the ironic laughter of the domestic Mungo, the annoyance of its master at his mirth? Could he possibly be unaware of the strange happenings in his house, of what signalled by day and crept on stairs at night? To look at him yearning there, he was the last man in the world to associate with the thrilling moment of an hour ago when Montaiglon met the marvel on the stairway; but recollections of Drimdarroch's treachery, and the admission of Doom himself that it was not uncommon among the chiefs, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... polished Persian. To them the ideal was higher than the material, and it was with their backs to the sun and their faces to the central shrine of their religion that they prayed. And how they prayed, these fanatical Moslems! Rapt, absorbed, with yearning eyes and shining faces, rising, stooping, grovelling with their foreheads upon their praying carpets. Who could doubt, as he watched their strenuous, heart-whole devotion, that here was a great living ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... threw my vision far down into the abyss. For one moment my fingers clutched convulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of ultimate escape wandered, like a shadow, through my mind—in the next my whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable. I let go at once my grasp upon the peg, and, turning half round from the precipice, remained tottering for an instant against its naked face. But now there came a spinning ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... And yet at this moment, whether it be the quiet of the place, or whether it be the sight of your philosophic countenance, I feel a kind of yearning for the contemplative life. I believe if I stayed here long you would lure me back to philosophy; and yet I thought I had finally escaped when I broke away from ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... had taken all of joy that post and settlement, friend and foe could give, lived for naught but his sparkling pleasures, he was now possessed of a great yearning to give to this woman, this goddess of the black braids; to give, only to give to her; to give of his strength, of his overwhelming love; aye, of even his heart's blood itself as he had told her ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... some miles of yellow brick mansions and flashing glasshouses testified that the view was a profitable one. To the women it was the alluringly wicked abode of society, and they held their hands before their faces when they mentioned it, to hide their yearning. Occasionally they imagined they caught a glimpse into it, when a minister from one of the states in the Balkan Peninsula strayed down to shed a tallow-candle lustre over a garden party. To both these views ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning. Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed—by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... was as necessary to Paul Mario as pure air to the general. Deliberate ugliness hurt him, and the ugliness which is the handiwork of God aroused within him a yearning sorrow for poor humanity who might be of the White Company, were it not for avarice, hate and lust. The war, even in its earlier phases, stirred the ultimate deeps of his nature, and knowing himself, since ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... may devote their days to lamenting at the old Wall, who pray each Passover "next year at Jerusalem," and who treasure their little casket of Palestinian earth, which some day will be placed over their shroud, look to Zionism as a "fulfillment" in its literal, Biblical meaning. Although the yearning for such a fulfillment may never be satisfied, it constitutes the impelling force, the prime motive, behind the people who are to settle once again in Canaan, and who are the stuff of which the philosophers' dreams ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... must arrange,' said Honor, hastily, as if silencing a yearning of her own. 'I do not need the Savilles to tell me I must not take it off their hands. The responsibility may be a blessing to him, and it would be wrong to relieve him of a penalty in the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... help thrusting down his beak when the bright speckled sides of his prey flash through the water. It was from neither cruelty nor vanity, for Thorne had less of both traits than usually falls to the lot of men; it was rather from the restlessness, the yearning of a strong nature for that which it needed, but had not yet attained; the experimental searching of a soul for its mate. That sorrow might come to others in the search he scarcely heeded; was he to blame that fair promises ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... between Lutheran and Catholic, but settled it in a way not at all to his mind; for it was the safeguard of princely interests against his plans for an imperial unity. Weary of the losing strife, yearning for ease, ordered by his physicians to withdraw from active life, Charles in the course of 1555 and 1556 resigned all his great lordships and titles, leaving Philip his son to succeed him in Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, and his brother Ferdinand ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... evil of our times is the unhappy division existing among the professors of Christianity, and from thousands of hearts a yearning cry goes forth for unity of faith and ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... some thought him domineering and severe; but now his manner was full of humility and peace. He was like a man who had seen a vision of eternal love; his soul was filled with a deep sympathy for sinful men and a great yearning to turn them from the error of their ways. Tonight the fighter was gone, and ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... how many pretexts a resolute, husband-hunting spinster can find for keeping a victim at her side, long after his soul has left her, and gone forth with yearning for a downy couch, a fragrant cheroot, or a ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... affection. It is harder for some to learn thus than for others. There are whose first impulse is ever to repel and not to receive. But learn they may, and learn they must. Even these may grow in this grace until a countenance unknown will awake in them a yearning of affection rising to pain, because there is for it no expression, and they can only give the man ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... heart calls for you, Many a Summer the grass has grown green, Blossomed and faded, our faces between; Yet with strong yearning and passionate pain, Long I to-night for your ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... vehement a command. Edith turned silently away, confirmed in a growing suspicion, and yearning tenderly over the little sister's suffering. It was the younger brother, of course!—the tall, silent man, whose lips had been so dumb, whose eyes so eloquent, during the critical days of Margot's illness, and who had been the girl's companion on the misty moor. What had ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Fare hopefully on in thy quest, Pass down through the green grassy portal That leads to the Valley of Rest; There first passed the One who, in pity Of all thy great yearning, awaits To point out The Beautiful City, And loosen the ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... pilgrimage for twelve years, one attains to a place better than the abodes reserved for heroes. By reading all the Vedas, one is instantly liberated from misery, and by practising virtue in thought, one attains to the heavenly regions. That man who is able to renounce that intense yearning of the heart for happiness and material enjoyments,—a yearning that is difficult of conquest by the foolish and that doth not abate with the abatement of bodily vigour and that clings like a fatal disease unto him,—is able to secure happiness. As the young calf is able to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... as the light lasted; flushed, and with the hair from his face. Or, at times, when he could not paint, he would sit for hours in thought of all the greatness the world had known from of old; until he was weak with yearning, like one who gazes ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... for the harvest, I said to myself, "God gathers in His harvest as soon as it is ripe, and if I devote myself to Him and pray much and turn entirely from the world I shall ripen, and so the sooner get where I am all the time yearning and longing to go!" I fear this was a merely selfish thought, but I do not know. This world seems less and less homelike every day I live. The more I pray and meditate on heaven and my Saviour and saints who have crossed the flood, the stronger grows ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... God sent him this road to make a second husband to the Widow Quin, and she with a great yearning to be wedded, though all dread her here. Lift him on her ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... a truth that the yearning of our nature is for reality, and that our personality cannot be happy with a fantastic universe of its own creation, then it is clearly best for it that our will can only deal with things by following their law, and cannot ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... I was much struck by Irving's treatment of interjections and exclamations in "Hamlet." He breathed the line: "O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt," as one long yearning, and, "O horrible, O horrible! most horrible!" as a groan. When we first went to America his address at Harvard touched on this very subject, and it may be interesting to know that what he preached in 1885 he had practiced ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... influences into which they may be thrown. This was probably the case even where that influence tended to degrade him from the plane he would have occupied, if left to himself. His spiritual life seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely important to contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... actually vote is kept down by the prosaic character of Italian electoral campaigns, by the influence of the papal Non Expedite,[552] and, most of all, by the habitual indifference of citizens, who, if the truth be told, for the most part have never displayed an insatiable yearning for the possession of the voting privilege. With the exception of the Socialists, no party has a clear-cut, continuous programme; none, save again the socialists, attempts systematically to arouse ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the tidings that Antioch had been taken by the infidels revived in St. Louis the old yearning for the rescue of the holy places. Cheered by the sympathy of Pope Clement IV, he embarked with an army of sixty thousand in 1270, but a storm drove his ships to Sardinia, and thence they sailed for Tunis. They encamped on the site of Carthage, when a plague broke out. The saintly king ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... knew that he could only repent, and not reform; yet all morally defaced and decayed as he was, was he not her own, her very own, the idol of her deathless worship? She said she was his serf, his slave, and she opened her yearning heart and took ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... faces bedward, we drove slowly down the winding lane to the dust-covered bridge, past the small cemetery where mother was sleeping, back to where the broad-roofed old house was waiting for us like some huge, faithful creature yearning to receive us once again beneath its wings. It was commonplace to our neighbors and without special significance to the world, but to my children it was noble and ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... What had brought the leader back was the look of heartrending yearning in the gray eyes of a tattered little boy. He smiled, seeing that look swiftly change to one of ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... very human, and... shall I say feminine? They were. They were a woman's eyes, a proper woman's eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a wistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a sort of all-wise and ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... events,—true and tender poets, moreover, and fully deserving of the honor,—whose spirits, I feel certain, would linger a little while about Poets' Corner for the sake of witnessing their own apotheosis among their kindred. They have had a strong natural yearning, not so much for applause as sympathy, which the cold fortune of their lifetime did but scantily supply; so that this unsatisfied appetite may make itself felt upon sensibilities at once so delicate and retentive, even a step or two beyond the grave. Leigh Hunt, for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... This same yearning was inspiring Marguerite when she came away from her lessons. She was advancing from one overpowering dread to another, accepting the first rudiments of surgery as the greatest of scientific marvels. At the same time, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... an angel voice Soft as the zephyr's tone? The yearning of a Mother mild To clasp once more her three months' child But a ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... actual personages are introduced, in the guise of shepherds, to discuss contemporary affairs, or for the so-called realistic pastoral, in which the town looks on with amused envy at the rustic freedom of the country. What it does comprehend is that outburst of pastoral song which sprang from the yearning of the tired soul to escape, if it were but in imagination and for a moment, to a life of simplicity and innocence from the bitter luxury of the court and the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... happiness—your ignorance. All unknown to you was this boundless devotion, the trusty arm, the blind slave, the silent tool, the wealth—for henceforth all I possess is mine only as a trust—which lay at your disposal; unknown to you, the heart waiting to receive your confidence, and yearning to replace all that your life (I know it well) has lacked —the liberal ancestress, so ready to meet your needs, a father to whom you could look for protection in every difficulty, a friend, a brother. The secret of your isolation is no secret to me! If I am bold, it is because ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac |
