Quotes About Pining

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

— Karen Marie Moning

“I don't know about you, but I'm kind of fed up with realism. After all, there's enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women. We should not rest until someone writes about a television show that features the Free People's World-Tree Library, with its elaborate waterfalls and Forbidden Books and Pirate-Magicians. We should be pining for a house haunted by rabbits.
(from the review of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners in The Guardian)”

— Audrey Niffenegger

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

— Julie Johnson

“We are in the monsoons and we must weather it out - the way of wisdom is, instead of pining for calmer days, to learn to live wisely and well in the midst of continuous strain.”

— Elton Trueblood

“If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion”

— Boethius

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

— Patricia Marx

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

— Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

— Abby McDonald

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

— Khushwant Singh

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

— David Gray

“Excuse me.
Nine hours ago, I broke off the single most pointlessly agonizing one-way relationship of my young life.
It was a thin slice of hell, and now it is over.. He's not mine. He never will be mine, and I've thrown away three years of my life pining and hoping. Well, not anymore, and I need to get him out of my system. I've given the matter serious thought, and all I want right now is for some total stranger to nail me to a mattress for the next fourteen hours. I will almost certainly cry all over you and call you by his name, but I assure you that my sexual frustration has built to such a fever peak that I will fuck you dry. What do you say?"
"whine”

— Carla Speed McNeil

“If you're a writer, you'll know it by the distinct feeling of only being able to breathe properly when alone with your characters. All other times, I'm panting
just pining for the next time I can be with them.”

— Karen Luellen

“Not Pining," she admitted. "But I look at you and you're so ... Awkward, and scruffy, and fearless, and just so intensely yourself, and I remember why I fell so hard for you. And in another universe, who knows?”

— Emily Horner

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

— Rainbow Rowell

“That was the deal with the really good-looking boys: they automatically assumed you were pining and panting for them and wouldn't be satisfied until you'd had their babies, no matter how ugly their personalities might be.”

— Sarra Manning

“I have to admit, you having a non-psycho, pining, or pissed-off ex is definitely a plus to our ongoing situation, I blurted. Logan grinned.”

— Kristen Ashley

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

— Paul Auster

“Japan. Not about the Japanese, but about moments of perfection. Commit it to memory and make good use of it. Because if I come home and you're still pining over this little girl without having given her a chance, I will call you a chicken shit for the rest of your life.”

— Melina Marchetta

“Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward's way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn't mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

“Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.”

— Agnes De Mille

“Stop pining over the one guy that you can't have,”

— Rachel Higginson

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

— Colleen Houck

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

— Colleen Houck

“Humans are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems an oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human's social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and, sadly, their greatest tragedies. It is as though something that helped them function and live well has gone missing, and they are pining for that missing thing in all sorts of odd methods, none of which are working. The greater tragedy is that very few people understand they have the disease. This seems strange as well because it is obvious. To be sure, it is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems. They are an entirely beautiful people with a terrible problem.”

— Donald Miller

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

— Susan Ee

“Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.”

— Tahir Shah

“I loved the idea of Travolta sitting on the kid's swing, pining away for his girlfriend.”

— Randal Kleiser

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

— Audrey Niffenegger

“Pining for what could have been only holds people back from living their lives now. Life is full of surprises, and it doesn't help us to fixate on regrets or try to recover what has been lost.”

— Jeff Goins

“If Sam were a tree, you know what kind of tree he'd be?"
"What kind?"
"A pine. Because of all the pining.”

— T.J. Klune

“The filmmakers who I'm pining to work for aren't ringing my phone off the hook.”

— Sean Astin

“She seemed to still be completely unaware that Elliot was pining openly for her and messing up customers' orders as a result. And the one time I'd tried to hint to her that there might be dating prospects with someone she already knew, someone she was friends with, she'd thought I was trying to set her up with Warren, and things had briefly gotten very uncomfortable.”

— Morgan Matson

“In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers' markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.”

— Thomas Frank

“Any role that's proactive is a great role, and action roles are by their very nature proactive. You get to do stuff. I hate sitting in a corner - I'd much prefer an action role in a popcorn movie rather than pining in a corner not doing anything.”

— Helen Mirren

“Sometimes he felt like he'd been gone his whole life
in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he'd never been.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— George MacDonald

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

— Taylor Swift

“He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world - he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was.”

— Lev Grossman

“I'm not some tortured, abandoned creature, Wayne," Marasi said, finding herself smiling at her distorted reflection in a ladle. "I'm not sitting around pining and dreaming for someone else to decide if I should be happy. There's nothing there. Whether that's due to actual lack of affection on his part, or more to stubbornness, I don't care. I've moved on.”

— Brandon Sanderson

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

— Tarryn Fisher

“She handed Lord Payne a steaming cup, and he took an immediate, reckless draught. A devilish smile curved her way. "Gunpowder tea? Well done, Miss Finch. I do enjoy a lady with a sense of humor."
Now this one ... he was a rake. It was written all over him, in his fine dress and flirtatious manner. He might as well have had the word embroidered on his waistcoat, between the gold-thread flourishes. She knew all about men of his sort. Half the young ladies in Spindle Cove were either fleeing them or pining for them.”

— Tessa Dare

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

— Cassandra Clare

“The only people who seem to believe in the phenomenon of men and women just being good friends all seem to have good friends who are pining miserably after them, waiting for them to break up with their significant others.”

— Tim Kreider

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

— Maggie Stiefvater

“Call me names, dearest! Call me thy bird
That flies to thy breast at one cherishing word,
That folds its wild wings there, ne'er dreaming of flight,
That tenderly sings there in loving delight!
Oh! my sad heart keeps pining for one fond word,
Call me pet names, dearest! Call me thy bird!”

— Frances Sargent Osgood

“Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.”

— Andrew Lang

“Not the rich viol, trump, cymbal, nor horn,
Guitar, nor cittern, nor the pining flute,
Are half so sweet as tender human words.”

— Bryan Procter

“Clamorous pauperism feastest
While honest Labor, pining, hideth his sharp ribs.”

— Martin Farquhar Tupper

“People say the media is feeding the public's hunger for celebrity news, but that's the drug pusher's mentality. I don't think anybody would be pining for news about Angelina Jolie's babies if it weren't being given to them in the first place.”

— Patti Smith