"Yearning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night, linger merrily 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... carrying on the work which had been interrupted by His death. St. Paul dares to say that he is filling up that which was lacking of Christ's sufferings for the sake of His body, the Church. He says that the heart of Christ is yearning after men in his heart; that the mind of Christ is scheming for the kingdom of God in his brain; he even compares the marks of persecution on his body to ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... isn't it!" he remarked inanely, before thinking it necessary to remove his head. Her face was still the face of tenderness, full of yearning. It did not change. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and carefully pressed it to his cheek and chin. When she took it away, he saw that it ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... life-ailment which made it impossible for her to continue acting. She had swallowed her aspirations, shedding a few tears. She lived in the hope of his triumph, and, as she had more time to think than he had, she suffered more keenly the agony of yearning unsatisfied. ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... most is the stealing in of night, when the sky takes on that strange elusive purple; when eyes turn to the evening star and marvel at its brightness; when the Eiffel Tower becomes a strange, shadowy stairway yearning in impotent effort to the ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... same afternoon under a ragged tamarisk hedge with the tide far out. He could never have done this if there had not been between them the accidental revelation of that night at Monkland; nor even then perhaps had he not felt in this young sister of his the warmth of life for which he was yearning. In such a matter as love Barbara was the elder of these two. For, besides the motherly knowledge of the heart peculiar to most women, she had the inherent woman-of-the-worldliness to be expected ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... if by some miracle he would draw it out with his eyes or with his breath. And the poor Poet cries out, "Pump! the water is gaining on us, and our shop is going to ruin. Pump!" Whereupon the lazy, absent-minded one resumes pumping, while yearning all the while for the plashing stone-rollers and the purling eaves of his home in Baalbek. And once in a pinch,—they are labouring under a peltering rain,—he stops as is his wont to remind Shakib ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... meantime, Herbert Rackliff had been collared by Bunk Lander, a big, husky village boy, whose face was ablaze with wrath and whose manner betrayed an almost irresistible yearning to punch the ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... the farther end. The night light burned low and the features of the boy upon the bed were scarcely visible. Stooping low, a fervent "Thank God" broke from the priest's lips as he recognized in the silent figure, the boy for whom his heart had been yearning. His boy had been the one that was saved. Yes, saved from death, saved from worse than death, saved to carry out the resolutions he had made while struggling in the icy ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... Elise who had always been so resolute and independent, feeling very small and pathetic, yearning for far-off things—utterly lonesome, and ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... these questions. The king of the people—the commander of the hosts—might be expected to ask such questions. And David was both these. But David was the father of Absalom, and all things besides gave way to the yearning of the father's heart. "Is the young man Absalom safe?" The first messenger cannot answer: or rather he evades the answer, for he does know the fact. And then quickly comes up the second messenger. And ...
— Is The Young Man Absalom Safe? • David Wright
... dear grannie, of whom it was no figure of speech to say that she had been indeed a mother. The idea of her absence from home for ever was too strange, too heartrending to be at once embraced, and as she neared the end of her journey on that long day, Carey's mind was chiefly fixed on the yearning to be with her husband and Janet, who had suffered such a shock without her. She seemed more able to feel through her husband-who was so devoted to his mother, than for herself, and she was every moment more uneasy about her little daughter, who must have ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... citizen of the United States at present in this ancient Moorish city: alone, I may almost say, in the midst of paradise. Yet the beauties of nature will not compensate for the solitude of the heart, which is continually yearning after sympathy; we wish for something beyond the pleasures of the eye, and I would that you were with me. I would take you up to me Alhambra, and descant to you for hours upon its perfections and its romantic history. ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... homesick race, or that Napoleon, on his distant campaigns, prohibited, from fear of desertion, the playing of their national airs. Smoky cities could be recalled, even in this land of desolation, without yearning or regret, but I could never think of the sunlit Alps or leafy boulevards without an irresistible longing to throw reputation to the winds and return to ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... to serve our Lord alone.' Bonaventura, who tells the story, goes on, with the true spirit of a monkish historian, to state how, 'the tempter being vanquished, departed, and the holy man returned victorious to his cell.' The piteous human yearning that is underneath this wild tale, the sudden access of self-pity and anger, mixed with a strange attempt, not less piteous than the longing, at self-consolation—all the struggle and conflict of emotion which stilled ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... of education, and the expansion of republican ideas, they become more sensible of their own anomalous and degraded condition, and the result is a yearning to be free like those around them, to have a land all their own, to have rights unquestioned by any superior color, to go wherever such privileges may be obtained. They see in the growing republics on the West coast of Africa, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... recollections; she had clung with fond regret to every place in which she had held sweet converse with her mother. Of a disposition singularly warm and affectionate, she had often, in her secret heart, pined for a more yearning and enthusiastic love than it seemed in the subdued nature of Lady Vargrave to bestow. In the affection of the latter, gentle and never fluctuating as it was, there seemed to her a something wanting, which she could not define. She ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... with that grim Shadow who knows the secret of our tears—their source and the bitter in them—and knows, too, the secret of everlasting peace. And thereafter, when at intervals his wings darkened the world for her, her thoughts went out, with a strange yearning, towards the dead who had once inhabited the ruin and could now roam through it only ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... The yearning which these people felt toward Mrs. Eddy, and their rapture at beholding her, can only be described by one of the pilgrims. In the Journal, June, 1899, Miss Martha Sutton Thompson writes to describe a visit which she made in January of that year to the meeting ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... and the Holy Mother have thee in their keeping!" Fra Francesco answered, with a yearning look in his loving face, in a tone that lingered on the sweet word "mother" and almost seemed to hint of an omission, as they clasped hands ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... at the letterboxes in spats, militant checks, high collar and a choker tie, which, yearning toward his ears, gave him the appearance of one who had floundered up out of his clothes for the third and last time. He came forward, frowned at the group, scowled at the negative distractions of the reading-room, and finally dragged over his chair just ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... love. Would not the child's heart break in despair when the first cold storm of the world sweeps over it, if the warm sunlight of love from the eyes of mother and father did not shine upon him like the soft reflection of divine light and love? The ardent yearning, which then awakes in the child, is the purest and deepest love. It is the love which embraces the whole world; which shines resplendent wherever the eyes of men beam upon it, which exults wherever it hears the human voice. It is the old, immeasurable love, a ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... come about that she owned so many mounds and heaps and pyramids of silver and metal and linen? What was this Inn that she had conceived as a project so unimaginably fine? Who were these shadow people that came and went there? Who was she? Why with all her vitality and all her hungry yearning for life and adventure couldn't she even believe in her own substantiality and focus? Wasn't life even real enough for a creature such as she to ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... have you not written? Why this long dead silence when my poor heart is hourly yearning for news of you and ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... orders, what were they to do? A stupor of helplessness seized upon them. Few came to the evening muster; few lighted fires to cook their suppers; every man lay down to rest where he was; yet fear, anguish, and yearning for home drove sleep from every eye. The expectation of the Persians that they would now surrender seemed likely to be realized, for without a guiding head and hand there seemed to many of the disheartened host nothing ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... you do not walk much in it, is usually cool and pleasant, but you must not take liberties. By the time we got back to lunch we could have believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after the talk filling the afternoon till afternoon tea-time, which we were to take at a famous house in the neighborhood, the temperature was all ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... attracts which most men fall Inamour'd, at first sight, withal 90 To these th' address with serenades, And court with balls and masquerades; And yet, for all the yearning pain Y' have suffer'd for their loves in vain, I fear they'll prove so nice and coy 95 To have, and t' hold and to enjoy That all your oaths and labour lost, They'll ne'er turn ladies of the post. This is not meant to disapprove Your judgment in your ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... fighter, though never yet a thinker nor even a scholar—amid a society as prejudiced and narrow-minded as all privileged communities are bound to become, had nevertheless drifted resistlessly towards that unfathomable sea whither a love for the abstract beautiful, a yearning for super-earthly harmony and justice, must inevitably waft ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... not wish to attach too much importance to this movement, but rather to suggest to a continent yearning for culture in letters and in speech whether it may not be carried too far. The reader will remember that there came a time in Athens when culture could mock at itself, and the rest of the country may be warned ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... incident, an American work on the Netherlands, i. p. 263, and the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate the yearning for sympathy which I felt. You who were among people grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each other's necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their eyes and triumph in their hearts, can picture ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... his woes. He knew that in her heart his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the consciousness of it. He would hang out no signals, he would take notice of none. He knew that a yearning glance fell upon him, now and then, through a film of tears, but he refused recognition of it. He pictured himself lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and die with that word unsaid. Ah, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... partially because he felt that he was fitted for more dignified employment, and as well for the fact that the railroad company had doubled the number of watchmen in the yards; but there were times when he felt the old yearning for excitement and adventure. These times were usually coincident with an acute financial depression in Billy's change pocket, and then he would fare forth in the still watches of the night, with ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the first blind yearning of the earth To be a mother and give happy birth, Ere yet the northern sun such rapture brings, Lo, from her virgin breast the Snowdrop springs; And ere the snows have melted from the grass, And not a strip of greensward doth appear, Save the faint prophecy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... he met Grizel he was yearning to ask her how she spent that night, but he knew she would not answer; it would be a long time before she gave him her confidence again. He offered her his piece of cold iron, however, and explained why he carried it, whereupon she flung it across the road, crying, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... even if I could do so, the outpouring of long-pent emotions which relieved the yearning love and haunting memories of sad, silent, lingering years. It is enough to tell you briefly of the story which was repeated in fragments through many hours of unfamiliar bliss. Soon after my departure from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... me press thee Close to my yearning heart, Ah! once more softly bless thee Ere we for ever part! I adjure thee not to falter In the trial now so nigh, But, as victim on the altar, ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... And leave us in terror and tears, While vain is the spirit's wild yearning That they may ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... heart no desire for open rebellion against domestic authority. The world was a dangerous, bad world, in which men were dust and women something lower than dust. She would tell herself so very often, and strive to believe herself when she did so. But, for all this, there was a yearning for something beyond her present life, for something that should be of the world, worldly. When she heard profane music she would long to dance. When she heard the girls laughing in the public gardens she would long to stay and laugh with them. Pretty ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... circumstances as sudden as these. Instead, a great sadness came over her, and tears filled her eyes to overflowing, for it was not so very long ago that Elsie Meek, a young girl like herself had come out to India full of life and laughter, yearning to give her energies scope, and trying for the sake of her gentle mother, to appear contented with the meagre life afforded by her surroundings. Honor suffered a pang of regret that she had not spared more time from her own ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... for love and for strength of faith, ever return which we experience in our childhood's years? What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues—innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for affection—are our sole ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... and enrol herself among the respectable members of the community. She was growing old; she wanted rest and a quiet home. Her early years had been passed in the country. She remembered still the green fields in which she played as a child, and to this woman, old and sin-stained, there came a yearning ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... becomes conscious of the wondrous love that is bending over it, yet all the time the love is growing in depth and tenderness. In a thousand ways, by a thousand delicate arts, the mother seeks to waken in her child a response to her own yearning love. At length the first gleams of answering affection appear—the child has begun to love. From that hour the holy friendship grows. The two lives become knit ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... her father murmured sadly, and in yearning love for the baby he must leave behind; ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... the golden globes that tremble like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as if exulting in its beauty—beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... done since in any one of my residences here, though some of them have been for six and nine months. As is quite natural. Who that lives in London ever goes to see the Tower? All things in Europe were so new and fresh and beautiful and wonderful to me then, and I had been yearning for them so earnestly for so many years, and this golden freedom followed so closely on the deadly ennui of Princeton, that I ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... in the familiar scenes I had learned so well to conjure up, I explored every nook and corner with the same yearning desire to find a trace of her. I was hardly ever away from "Parva sed Apta." There were Madame Seraskier and Mimsey and the major, and my mother and Gogo, at all times, in and out, and of course ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... speaking. In his yearning for sympathy, in his intense desire to impart the miserable news to some one who would feel for him, he had come to his friend Bill. He had thought first of going to Mr. Porson. But though his master would sympathize with him he would ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... image. It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion. I had left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries—to be reconciled and ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... whom I honour and love more than anyone else, comes from a fish-shop in Hackney. That's the fascinating part of it. Do understand me, Peggy," he continued, after a short silence, during which she regarded him almost uncomprehendingly. "I don't say I'm yearning to sleep in a filthy dug out or to wallow in the ground under shell-fire, or anything of that sort. That's beastly. There's only one other word for it, which begins with the same letter, and the superior kind of private doesn't use it in ladies' society.... But while I'm lying here I wonder what ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes—these will not trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... the 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 power in the world, reactionary but tremendous, countless millions all ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... peculiarities of sacred origin,—and the world given to understand that no common rule or measure could apply to such an undoubtedly divine production; and so the hearts of men were to be wrung with pity for his sorrows as the yearning pain of a god, and with anger at his injuries as sacrilege on the sacredness of genius, till they were ready to cast themselves at his ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... charm of Cassicium consisted in its silence, its peace, and, above all, its fresh air. Augustin's tired lungs breathed there a purer air than in Milan, where the humid summer heat is crushing. His soul, yearning for retirement, discovered a retreat here in harmony with his new desires, a country solitude of which the Virgilian grace still appealed to his literary imagination. The days he passed there were days of blessedness for him. Long afterwards he ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... them hope at last that the little ones might escape the fever for this time; and Christie's thoughts began to turn homeward again. But not so anxiously as before. The pain of parting from the children would be harder now. And during these days she began to feel a strange yearning tenderness for the poor young mother, scarcely less helpless and in need of care than they. It had come to be quite the regular thing now for Mrs Greenly to take an hour's rest in the attic-nursery when the children had fallen asleep, while Christie ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... constitutes the one painful feature of Vosges travel. Of course there is a wide difference between the supporters of retaliation, such journals as L'Alsacien-Lorrain, and quiet folks who hate war, even more than a foreign domination. But the yearning towards the parent country is too strong to be overcome. No wonder that as soon as the holidays begin there is a rush of French tourists across the Vosges. From Strasburg, Metz, St. Marie aux Mines, they flock ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... voices of the world were storm-deadened. They cried no warning to these drifting hearts. How should they know in that moment when their souls reached toward each other that the wisdom of the ages had decreed their yearning futile? ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... her head, and bringing out the reddish tones of her hair. We were to be married in a month, and she looked so beautiful in the peace and quiet of the waning day, that I wished we two were alone that I might take her in my yearning arms and raise that exquisite colorless face to my lips. She never seemed so lovely as when contrasted with Kate's mature, sensual beauty, dark and rich as the Creole, and completely devoid of that touch of the pure and heavenly without which no woman's face is perfect to me. Amy was ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... cold, but she sat down by the shore, and let her head droop as she listened to the sea-dirge. She could love him, now that it was in vain. She knew now the warm yearning for his presence which at Ullswater had never troubled her, and it was too late. No tears came to her eyes; she did not even breathe a deeper breath. Most likely it would pass without ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... say all this. Besides, she was so crushed, poor girl; she considered herself infinitely beneath me; how could she feel anger or resentment? She suddenly leapt up from her chair with an irresistible impulse and held out her hands, yearning towards me, though still timid and not daring to stir.... At this point there was a revulsion in my heart too. Then she suddenly rushed to me, threw her arms round me and burst into tears. I, too, could not restrain myself, and sobbed as ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... that they may enjoy the pleasures of intemperance, and courageous from fear of danger. Whereas the philosopher is seeking after wisdom and not after pleasure, whether near or distant: he is the mystic, the initiated, who has learnt to despise the body and is yearning all his life long for a truth which will hereafter be revealed to him. In the Republic the pleasures of knowledge are affirmed to be superior to other pleasures, because the philosopher so estimates them; and he alone has had experience of both kinds. (Compare ...
— Philebus • Plato
... to, looked up. His melancholy deep eyes were sombre, yet full of fire,—lonely eyes they were, yearning for love. ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... proud aim, your art's high truth Have kept the promise of your youth; And while you won the crown which now Breaks into bloom upon your brow, My soul cried strongly out to you Across the ocean's yearning blue, While, unremembered and afar, I watched you, as I watch a star Through darkness struggling into view, And loved you better than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... once lighted up with a smile. "Sit down near us," whispered the physician to Amos, as he came up close to him, and all three sat on the sloping bank not many feet away from the bench. Oh, how the heart of Amos ached with yearning to throw his arms round his mother's neck; but he knew that it must not be yet. Julia and Walter also found it hard ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... who was a small, plump woman, with a solemn face, who had lived with the widow for many years and who had become her devoted disciple. Whatever the widow did, that also did Dorcas—not so well, for her heart told her she could never expect to do that, but with a yearning anxiety to do everything as well as she could. She rose at five minutes past six, and in a subsidiary way she helped to get the breakfast, to eat it, to wash up the dishes, to work in the garden, to quilt, to sew, to visit and receive, and ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... despised the "hoi polloi" as only a stupid, miseducated snob can despise, he appreciated that they had votes and so must be conciliated; and he yearned with the snob's famished yearning for the title and dignity of judge. Davy found it impossible to convince him that the injunctions and indictments ought to be attacked until he had convinced him that in no other way could he become Judge Galland. As Hugo ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... pursued) roamed all about the familiar rooms and corridors of the house of the principles and mysteries of insurance. His knowledge of its possibilities enabled him to develop an astonishing ingenuity in creating cases ripe and yearning for the benefits of provision against contingencies, and as he very easily was able to prove to Rosalie, and found immense delight in proving, he had under his finger, that is to say in his exquisitely arranged filing ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... Chaillu. The bush, however, supplies an abundance of "beef," and, as most South Africans, they have a word, Isangu (amongst the Mpongwes), or Ingwamba (of the Cape Lopez people), to express that inordinate longing and yearning for the stimulus of meat diet, caused by the damp and depressing equatorial climate, of which Dr. Livingstone so pathetically complains. The settlements are sometimes provided with little plots of vegetables; usually, however, the plantations are distant, to preserve them from the depredations ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Kid suddenly experienced the yearning that all men feel when wrong-doing loses its keen edge of delight. He yearned for the woman he loved to reassure him that she was his in spite of it. He wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... wave of pained regret and yearning arose in him for the days when life was taken more quietly, more earnestly, more soberly—with the trust and love of God inspiring the soul to purity and peace— when to find a woman who was at the same time an atheist was a thing ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... be true that we are selfish to the extent of being satisfied simply with our own salvation, when His heart of infinite love and compassion is yearning with unfathomable tenderness over ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... outraging the sympathies of humanity. Theologians tell us of the degraded nature of man; and they tell us what is true. Yet man is essentially a moral agent, and there is that immortal and unextinguishable yearning for something pure and spiritual which will plead against these poetical sensualists as long as ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... after three years of deprivation, she seemed to him more beautiful than ever—the interval having served merely to enhance her charm and strengthen the yearning of his heart—she seemed in the same view still further removed from his sphere. More reserved, more dignified, in the reserve of developed womanhood, her cession was the more ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Rincon family, now stood forth so prominently. Somber, moody, and retiring; delicately sensitive and shrinking; acutely honest, even to the point of morbidity; deeply religious and passionately studious, with a consuming zeal for knowledge, and an unsatisfied yearning for truth, the little Jose early in life presented a strange medley of characteristics, which bespoke a need of the utmost care and wisdom on the part of those who should have the directing of his career. Forced into the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... unsatisfactory as they seemed to himself, might yet, he thought, help her to the reconciliation he knew she desired. He was scarcely less anxious for it. For Beatrice he would never know that limitless passion, that infinite yearning alike of spirit and of sense, which had been his love for Emily; but she was very dear to him, and with all his heart he desired to make her happiness. He imaged her beauty and her talent with pride which made his veins warmer. Her husband, he would be loyal to his last breath. Community of ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... memorials of his birthright and his home—the conviction of the influence she still retained over his bleak and solitary existence—the experience she had already acquired that the influence failed where she had so fondly hoped it might begin to repair and to bless, all overpowered her with emotions of yearning tenderness and unmitigated despair. What could she do? She could not offer herself, again to be rejected. She could not write again, to force her penitence upon the man who, while acknowledging his love to be unconquered, had so resolutely refused to see, in the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the theory on which this yearning for a return to nature is based. For it is quite probable that if a Golden Age ever existed it was Communistic; it is also true that certain primitive tribes have found it possible to continue the same system, for the simple reason that when and ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... hard with him. It troubled his heart, and many hours of the night he had been kept awake by the thought of it, that he could not send his children to school, nor teach them himself to read. They were good children, he said, with a moist yearning in his eyes; they were all the wealth he had, and he loved them the more, the harder he had to work for them. The poorest part of the poverty that was on him, was that he could not give his children the letters. They were good children, for all the crock of the shop was ...
— Jemmy Stubbins, or The Nailer Boy - Illustrations Of The Law Of Kindness • Unknown Author
... room?" Then she knew she wanted to kiss him and she did. She kissed his silky, scented little head, she kissed his chubby little cheek, she kissed his little cold hands. She wanted to squeeze him—to cuddle him, just as she used to squeeze and cuddle her kittens. Something delightful and yearning and brooding seemed to have taken possession of her. She had never ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... stood at the bank. Tiredness and hunger had weakened him, and whatever for should he walk on, wherever to, to which goal? No, there were no more goals, there was nothing left but the deep, painful yearning to shake off this whole desolate dream, to spit out this stale wine, to put an end to this miserable ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... were developing in him, and the camp-life, replete with misery as it was, was secretly endearing itself to him all the time. But White Fang was unaware of it. He knew only grief for the loss of Kiche, hope for her return, and a hungry yearning for the free life ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... son!" and the nerveless form, that had scarce moved for years, was raised upon the bed by the last yearning effort of a ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... palace which Messer Luca Pitti had set a-building with huge stones got from the Hill of Bogoli [now Boboli] close behind, or perhaps to transact a little business with the cloth-dressers in Oltrarno. The exorbitant line of the Pitti roof is hidden from San Miniato; but the yearning of the old Florentine is not to see Messer Luca's too ambitious palace which he built unto himself; it is to be down among those narrow streets and busy humming Piazze where he inherited the eager life of his fathers. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... expression for ever, as was done for the Hebrew people when the sorrow of exile was put into the hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, and the sorrow of death into the lament for Saul and Jonathan, and the yearning of love into what was once known as 'the ballad of ballads,' the Song ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... encourage the boy in his foolish boasting. On their way they passed near to Fern's Hollow, and Stephen heard little Nan's shrill voice calling his name, as if she were seeking him weariedly; but when he hesitated for a moment, his heart yearning to answer her, Black Thompson again patted him on the back, and bade him never show the white feather, but remember poor dead Snip; at which his passion for revenge returned, and he pressed on ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... recollection His heart with sudden joy is filled,—310 His ears are by the music thrilled, His eyes take pleasure in the road Glittering before him bright and broad; And Benjamin is wet and cold, And there are reasons manifold 315 That make the good, tow'rds which he's yearning, Look fairly like a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... but not for that decays The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man That never rested yet since life began From striving with red Nature and ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... but there was yet another butterfly of my namesake's. He led us to a by-path that followed the river bank up to the bridge, running far ahead of us. When we reached him he was seated, dumb with yearning, before a newly ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... clear up with more rapidity if we went to the other extreme and thought of labor always as thirty million separate individuals. We would be nearer the truth than to consider them as this one great like-minded mass, all yearning for the same spiritual freedom; all eager for the downfall ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... depths of her heart, which now and again beat furiously, she had a secret hope that when once the idea was broached Leonard would do the rest. And as she thought of that 'rest' a languorous dreaminess came upon her. She thought how he would come to her full of love, of yearning passion; how she would try to keep towards him, at first, an independent front which would preserve her secret anxiety until the time should come when she might yield herself to his arms and tell him all. For hours she wrote letter after letter, destroying them as quickly as she ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... races; and later, the Crusades, which, whatever else they accomplished, certainly vulgarized oriental studies, inspired some few with a fervent desire to wrest from infidels the scene of our Lord's Passion, but the greater number with a lust of pillage and a yearning to ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... presently the rumour of his fame reached those whom he had left behind in the quiet little town of his birth and boyhood,—and his mother, reading the frantic eulogies, and still more frantic attacks of the different sections of press opinion, wept with excitement and tenderness and yearning; and his father, startled at the strange power and authority with which this new Apostle of Truth appeared to be invested, trembled as he read, but nevertheless held himself more erect with a pride in his own old age that he had never ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Sir Gawaine, yearning, by reason of his hatred, to get Sir Lancelot out of his castle to fight with him, now sent knights to cry out shame upon him under his walls. Thus they marched up and down, calling out insulting names and charging ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... portmanteau in the house was overhauled and carefully and thoughtfully packed by the mother's yearning hands. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... power of knowledge and scientific fact will ever prevent human unhappiness from reaching out towards some land of dreams of which the burning brightness of a sea sunset is an image. Is it very hard to believe, then, that in that yearning towards the miracle of a sun quenched in sea distance, felt and felt again in human hearts through countless generations, the westward stream of human activity on this planet had its rise? Is it unreasonable to picture, on an earth spinning eastward, a treadmill ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... on his mistress, the conqueror let the rescued treasure tumble bodily from his shoulders into the eager arms, upon the yearning bosom. With incoherent expressions of endearment to her darling boy, of thanks to their brave and faithful servant, and of praise to the merciful Father of all, the widowed mother clasped the lost and found to her heart, being in turn all but choked and smothered ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... of that land to which with yearning Her true heart turned in faith and trust each day The land whose hope a glorious bow of promise Illumed her ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... parentage; but except one Englishman, whom I met at the Stanfords', who said I reminded him of some one whom he had seen, there has been nothing to lead me to suppose that any one thought of me except as a friend of the Stanfords. But, Elsie, though I am not discontented, still at times there is the old yearning for my own people. But God knows best, and I am not going to waste my life in useless longings. I have got five pupils in Dringenstadt already, and several more applications, and next week I begin my life-work as a ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... 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 side ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... audience behind them on the great plantation, but they still sang to the empty road and courtesied to the cedars upon the way. Excitement gripped them like a frenzy—and a childish joy in a coming change blended with a mother's yearning ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Yet hated of Ma(r)s, How ceaseless their tattle Of tumbles and scars! Such warnings are vain, For thy rites we prepare, Youth is yearning again In thy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... old enough to value life, and to know that what she called the real things were escaping here. At night, as she looked up at the myriad stars spangling the heavens, the girl's heart was filled with an unutterable yearning; a sense of restriction, of limitation, of loss—a sense that somewhere lay a Purpose and a Plan, and that only by becoming part of that Plan could life be lived to the fullest. Her mother was of a different nature, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... spring drew near, a new anxiety began to press upon Draxy. Reuben drooped. The sea-shore had never suited him. He pined at heart for the inland air, the green fields, the fragrant woods. This yearning always was strongest in the spring, when he saw the earth waking up around him; but now the yearning became more than yearning. It was the home-sickness of which men have died. Reuben said little, but Draxy divined ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the 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 brighter auspices and ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... to its close, ending, like the "Iliad," with a great bale-fire. Two closing lines record like an epitaph the praise of the dead in superlatives; not as a warrior, but as a man and a ruler: how that he was towards men the mildest and most affable, towards his people he was most gracious and most yearning ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... his fortunes and environment; and so as time went on the poignancy of his sorrow and regret diminished, as it does with all of us. Yet the sight of a gray-haired man still brought a pang to his heart, and there were times of yearning longing to recall every line of the face, every detail of the dress, the voice, the words, of the girl who had been so dear to him, and who had gone out of his life as irrevocably, it seemed to him, as ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... again said Winsome, while Ralph yearned with a great yearning for the boy to betake himself over the moor. But Andra had no ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... The yearning of anxiety in her voice was intense enough, he thought, to balance the grief of all the mothers ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... "The natural yearning of the nation, therefore, was toward colonial expansion, and, although note that I make no charges against either the German Government or German people, the nation probably has wished sovereignty over Western Europe, through Belgium and Holland to the sea. Its narrow ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearly seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge. Against the darker background of Vance's fear and sinister purpose—both of this present life, and recent—he saw the grandeur of this woman's impossible dream, and knew, beyond ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... true; he has taken the form of drugs and spirituous liquors, and so his work of devastation goes on." Then followed the story of the sacrilegious marriage to save her father from suicide, of her early widowhood; and the proffer of the Baroness to give her a home. Of her life of servitude there, her yearning for an education, and her meeting with "Apollo," as she designated Preston Cheney. "For truly he was like the glory of the rising day to me, the first to give me hope, courage and unselfish aid. I loved him, I worshipped him. He loved me, but he strove to crush ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... a-quiver and restless to-night: I have never felt like this before. The white, silver light of the full moon is flooding the heavens and brimming over on every side like the bubbling foam of wine, ... It seizes on me like a yearning, like a mantling intoxication. Here, ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... of her step, her silence, her numbed, yearning look across the lawn told Mrs. Westmore of the death of all ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... clear, level eyes. Her curt, crisp speech was full of meaning. He looked long at her, with a yearning denied for many a day. Her face was the same, yet wonderfully changed; the same in line and color, but different in soul and spirit. The old sombre shadow lay deep in the eyes, but to it had been added gleam of will and reflection of thought. The whole face ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... that to Violante the consciousness of her own want of personal attractions was, despite her yearning for a life to be filled with thoughts and objects to which beauty could contribute nothing, a source of bitter and ever-present mortification. There was inconsistency, doubtless, in regret for the deficiency of personal attraction in persons who, with perfect sincerity, declared ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... fact remains that frequently I feel a longing, amounting almost to a yearning, for her company. Undoubtedly the explanation lies in my increasing desire to develop, by precept, by proverb and by admonition, the higher side of her nature. Moreover, it is to me evident that this intercourse must prove mutually helpful. Quite aside from the beneficial results ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... criticized as vague, but this vagueness was the result, not of cowardice or insincerity, but of the inherent difficulty of putting the spirit of the movement into words. A youth whose heart is stirred by all the aspirations of coming manhood, "yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield," might have the same hesitation in writing down his yearnings and aspirations on a sheet of paper, and might be as unwisely snubbed ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... unrest of unsatisfied souls meets its earliest solace in the effective and sympathetic expression of the same unrest from the lips of another. To look it in the face is the first approach to a sedative. To find our discontent with the actual, our yearning for an undefined ideal, our aspiration after impossible heights of being, shared and amplified in the emotional speech of a man of genius, is the beginning of consolation. Some of the most generous spirits ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Frank," Nance whispered. "Typical Syrtis. He wants to be home—with his girl. I guess you know that nostalgia—yearning terribly for old, familiar surroundings—is a major symptom. It's like a command from them—to get out of Mars. The red rash is something extra he picked up. An allergy... Oh, we think he'll survive. Half of them now do. He's big and ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Waltzes and Polkas which I love. It 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 this, which ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... yearning sadness in her face But added to that nameless grace, That spell by which some women reign In hearts ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... into silence, and again he beat the ground with his cane. Godwin was strongly interested in this broken revelation; he found it difficult to understand Moxey's yearning for domesticity, all his own impulses leading towards quite a contrary ideal. To him, life in London lodgings made rich promise; that indeed would be freedom, and full of all manner ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the chiefs that administer judgment, Guarding the law of the Gods, as a sign to the sons of Achaia Bear it in hand:—upon this do I swear, and severe is the sanction! Rue for Achilles hereafter shall rise in the Danaeid leaguer:— Bitter the yearning shall be—nor in thee, howsoever afflicted, Succour be found at their need—but remorse shall be raging within thee, Tearing thy heart that by thee was the best of Achaians dishonour'd." Speaking he dash'd on the ground, in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... had a black skin, she had a tender, loving heart, and she had pored over the Christ-life until she had unconsciously imbibed its spirit. She was always yearning to comfort some one. Later in the day she stood at the door of the white mansion, holding her precious lilies. "They're for his mother," she said to Dinah. "Tell her we chil'ens loved Frankie, and we're all ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 39, No. 03, March, 1885 • Various
... there was nowhere to run to and she could not have stopped him if she had tried. He was launched, the hour had come, the, to him, supreme and awful hour, and all the smothered passion and hope and yearning of the past month ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away, and would not come to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life and give her soul a sense of home in it. No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold |
