Missing someone is a feeling that we have all noticed at some point. Whether due to distance or death, we may feel like we miss that person we used to have close to us.
This feeling can be a reason for sadness and even cause certain psychological disorders.
Without further ado, We are going to know the best phrases of longing that great writers have left us thinkers and poets of all times.
1. Don’t succumb to homesickness. Go to the street. Go to a neighboring city, a foreign country…, but don’t travel to the past, it hurts. (Pablo Picasso)
An optimistic phrase from the great artist from Malaga.
2. Between you and me (mengana mia) stood a Berlin wall made of empty hours of fleeting longings. (Mario Benedetti)
An unforgettable verse from the Uruguayan poet.
3. Longing suffocated under habit. (Gustave Flaubert)
Poetic reflection by the author of Madame Bovary.
4. The present does not exist, it is a point between illusion and longing. (Lorenzo Villalonga)
Phrase of longing to reflect deeply.
5. No matter how well the stitches are done, it is difficult to live when our viscera have been replaced by longing for a person; It seems that the latter takes up more space than the former, we feel it continually, and what’s more, what ambiguity to be forced to think about a part of one’s own body! (Marcel Proust)
A way to experience grief and missing.
6. I suddenly found myself at the culmination of the joy of love and consequently at the peak of my life, of my longings and aspirations. (Hermann Hesse)
The best moment of this philosopher’s life.
7. For too long I struggled with longing, with my gaze fixed on the distance, for too long I remained in solitude, so I no longer know how to keep silent. (Nietzsche)
8. Longing is the path before becoming a pillar of salt. (Enrique Mugica)
If one does not remedy it, it can be the path to perdition.
9. A goose is prohibited from any hint of longing. A goose has things to do, he demands a lot from himself and looks down on his goose tricks. (Robert Walser)
A funny phrase that may have a hidden meaning.
10. I am going to miss you every moment, every moment of the day, because you have become the sun that illuminates my life. (Megan Maxwell)
Longing even before losing.
11. You have had to accept hardships. That tans, it shapes the character. (Libba Bray)
An iron personality is based on austerity and self-improvement.
12. Now I realize that it wasn’t her who left me. I was the one who didn’t follow her. I chose and I stayed. Condemned, turned into a lighthouse, like in stories that don’t end well. Learning that the measure of affection is longing. Learning to know how to be. I. With me. Being. (Alejandro Palomas)
Beautiful verse about a farewell.
13. I move the memory around the apartment from one side to the other, as if it were a piece of furniture or a painting that I don’t know where to hang. (Nathan Filer)
Metaphor to understand how memories can anchor us to the past.
14. Who knows how it had been covered with very thin, almost imperceptible veils, which isolated it from reality. She had been mummifying. (Jose Augustine)
To reflect.
15. Perhaps he and I trusted too much in the permanence of old complicities worn little by little by distance and apathy. (Antonio Muñoz Molina)
The wear and tear of coexistence can lead to dead-end situations.
16. It’s very strange to feel like you long for something you’re not even sure you know. (David Foster Wallace)
Sometimes, this feeling overwhelms us after having lived a very intense experience.
17. We will never know if all past time was truly better, or so it seems to us because it is time read, not lived; time deciphered in the pages of authors who have demystified and re-mythologized it for us. (Abilio Estevez)
A psychological paradox difficult to explain.
18. Before I was someone who knew many things. Now no one asks me for my opinion or advice. I miss. Before I was curious, independent and confident. I miss being sure of things. There is no peace in not being sure of everything, all the time. I miss doing everything with ease. I miss not being part of what’s important. I miss feeling needed. I miss my life and my family. I loved my life and my family. (Lisa Genova)
As the years go by, we can have these mixed feelings.
19. Listen to me. If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it pulling on your back and running its fingers along your spine, the best thing you can do, the only thing, is run. (Lauren Oliver)
Forward and until you feel alive again.
20. A place I wasn’t sure I loved. A place that no longer existed, because what she was beginning to long for now that she was there was the Elizondo of her childhood. (Redondo Pains)
One of those phrases of longing that makes us feel nostalgic again.
21. One should never long for the old days. He who longs for the old days is a longing old man. (Daniel Glattauer)
We cannot live without looking to the future.
22. It is not good to take formulas out of their frozen state, to turn secrets into words, to translate memories into feelings, capable of killing even things as good and severe as love and hate. (Heinrich Boll)
Reflection on emotions and what we do with them.
23. They are what I was. They are what I lost, they are all I want to see. (Paula Hawkins)
Missing is something very human.
24. The dead belong to the living who most obsessively claim them. (James Ellroy)
When someone leaves us, it seems that is when we need them the most.
25. It is healthy to unclog the pipes of memory and finish making peace with everything that was left behind. (María Dueñas)
A kind of emotional catharsis, very necessary.
26. Things from the past must be left alone. (Fred Vargas)
It’s better not to pay much attention to them.
27. When you feel homesick, look up at the sky. (Donna Tartt)
Moving forward is an obligation.
28. He had broken her heart to install the poison of longing. (Guillaume Musso)
This is how this French writer expressed himself.
29. Some details were erased, but the longing persisted. (Gustave Flaubert)
Memory can forget specific things, but hardly emotions.
30. How he longed for the ineffable feelings of love that at that time he tried to imagine through books! (Gustave Flaubert)
Another phrase of longing from the French writer.
31. I don’t have any home. So why would I feel homesick? (Carson McCullers)
A peculiar vision of home.
32. Because we can also long for our mistakes. (Ernesto Sabato)
To err is so human that it even deserves memory and praise.
33. Time had passed with enough force to reduce his then nervous passion to the rank of curious anecdotes, which age poorly and begin to seem artificial, as if they depended on an already obsolete memory technology that revealed that the drama was staged in a papier-mâché stage. (Juan Villoro)
Reflection of the Mexican journalist and writer.
34. Anything that reminds me of you makes me so sad that I can’t stand it. (Orhan Pamuk)
After a breakup we can feel this deep regret.
35. I always realize things late: I am very good at the past, not the present. I can’t understand the present. (Nick Hornby)
In retrospect, everything is understandable and coherent.
36. (…) But there is no way to avoid time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and oblivion, the years of hopes, lost and irrecoverable, of this land that was almost allowed to reclaim its better destiny, only to have it taken away from her by the same evil people as always, and she would be dragged and kidnapped into the future in which we must live now and forever. (Thomas Pynchon)
Famous quote about longing from this American writer.
37. It is the tragedy of love, you can never love something you have more than something you long for. (Jonathan Safran Foer)
This is love, even if it is painful.
38. He who suffers has memory. (Cicero)
Past mistakes can stay with us for a long time.
39. Saudade… A Portuguese word that has no literal translation; It means a deep longing for something or someone that is no longer there and may never return. A kind of ultra-moving hyper-nostalgia. The love that persists when someone is gone. (Mhairi McFarlane)
You can learn more about the saudade concept in this post.
40. On the way I left a leg, a lung and a piece of liver. But I must say, right at this moment, that I was happy with cancer. I remember it as one of the best times of my life. (Albert Espinosa)
The life of this Catalan writer was marked by cancer and personal improvement.
41. Mr. Baron was really, in the last months of his life, nothing more than a shadow of what he was, as they say, and before that shadow, which increasingly took on more spectral features, everyone moved further and further away. And I myself, naturally, no longer had the same relationship with Paul’s shadow as I did with the Paul of before. (Thomas Bernhard)
Free interpretation.
42. I remember with love the boy or girl I was, knowing that I did the best I could with the knowledge I had at the time. (Louise L. Hay)
A positive look at the adventures of another time.
43. My childhood is memories of a patio in Seville, and a clear orchard where the lemon tree matures; my youth, twenty years in the land of Castile; my story, some cases that I don’t want to remember. (Antonio Machado)
Childhood memories are some of the ones that produce the most nostalgia.
44. The day or night in which oblivion explodes, jumps into pieces or crackles, the atrocious memories and those of wonder will break the bars of fire and will finally drag the truth through the world, and that truth will be that there is no oblivion. (Mario Benedetti)
Everything that happens leaves a trace, even if it is in our minds.
45. Tormented by our memories, we dedicate ourselves to polishing our memory. (Boris Cyrulnik)
Reviewing our memories offers us the possibility of building a self-concept with which we feel comfortable.
46. I’m not lonely but I like to be alone, I like to love you from afar, miss you sometimes. (Macaque)
Homesickness can be an exhilarating feeling.
47. What happens in the past is experienced again in memory. (John Dewey)
To what extent does what we experience when remembering belong to the past and not to the present?
48. Nothing can last that long, there is no memory, no matter how intense, that does not fade away. (Juan Rulfo)
Like all things, memories fade, since nothing lasts forever.
49. Memories do not populate our loneliness, as they say; On the contrary, they make it deeper. (Gustave Flaubert)
We can feel more isolated if we base our lives on remembering.
50. Let’s not lose anything from the past. Only with the past is the future formed. (Anatole France)
Forgetting is also losing valuable knowledge.
51. The past does not want to be changed. (Stephen King)
What has happened tends to remain in our consciences.
52. Look back and laugh at past dangers. (Walter Scott)
In retrospect, certain past risks make us feel better.
53. The past, a lake for a single swimmer: memory. (Ali Ahmad Said Esber)
Only through memory can we experience the past.
54. Certain memories are like common friends, they know how to make reconciliations. (Marcel Proust)
We can once again find truths about ourselves in memories.
55. The worst way to miss someone is to sit next to them and know that you can never have them. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
A form of feeling of loneliness that does not understand distances.
56. Take care of all your memories, you can’t relive them. (Bob Dylan)
This is one more reason why memories matter.
57. There is no nostalgia worse than longing for something that never happened. (Joaquín Sabina)
A way to deceive yourself.
58. It’s funny how we cling to the past, while we wait for our future. (Ally Condie)
A paradox that keeps us stagnant.
59. Ah the good times! When we were so unhappy. (Alexander Dumas)
The passage of time leads us to idealize the past.
60. You can’t have a better future if you are thinking about yesterday all the time. (Charles Kettering)
A very simple idea to avoid staying in the past
61. Things are not the way they used to be, and probably never were. (Will Rogers)
One of the phrases of longing that best summarizes this state of consciousness.
62. There is nothing as sweet as one’s homeland and one’s own parents, even if one has the most opulent mansion in a strange and distant land. (Homer)
The familiar is linked to our identity.
63. I love to remember: but nostalgia corrodes my body. (Tony Duvert)
This feeling can make memory a double-edged sword.
64. Do not leave the past as the past, because you will put your future at risk. (Winston Churchill)
With the past you have to build new things.
65. We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and the impulse for the strange. In most cases, we feel nostalgic for places we have never known. (Carson McCullers)
A balance between the desire to know and the desire to inhabit the known.
66. Maybe you had to leave to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to discover how beloved your starting point was. (Jodi Picoult)
Absence is what, on many occasions, makes us value what we had.
67. We long for places, we remember places; They are the sounds, smells and sights of places that haunt us and against which we often measure our present. (Alan Gussow)
About the way these memories make us value the present moment.
68. Russia is the only country in the world that you can feel nostalgic for while you are still in it. (John Updike)
A humorous reflection on the size of this enormous country.
69. I come to my lonely walk in the woods as nostalgia comes home. (Henry David Thoreau)
Thoreau is famous for having lived for a long time in a log house in the woods, and so found this environment familiar.
70. I have been homesick for countries I have never been to, and longed to be where I couldn’t be. (John Cheever)
The feeling of longing can even arise through fantasizing about places we have never set foot in.
71. Leave the past behind so the future can find you. (Brittainy C. Cherry)
It is up to us to move forward building our future and without looking back.
72. How you have the courage, which has always hurt me. To remember what was and what could have been. (The secrets)
Since its premiere, La Calle del Olvido has become a true generational anthem.
73. I live at number 7, Melancolía Street. (Joaquín Sabina)
Sabina’s eternal verses tell us about longing, melancholy and heartbreak.
74. And although I didn’t want to return. She always returns to first love. (Carlos Gardel)
Thinking about past loves is one of the things that causes us the most nostalgia.
75. Sometimes, to really move forward, you have to leave your past behind, that includes many things and many people who were part of it (Michael Linen)
We must get rid of everything that prevents us from moving forward in life.
76. The easiest way to leave the past behind is to remember that love does not live in the past, only memories, love lives in the present. (Bryant McGill)
A phrase full of inspiration that tells us about how love works.
77. We will meet again. I don’t know when or where. But we’ll see you again on a sunny day. (Vera Lynn)
“Well meet again” is one of the songs that became most popular in the 1940s.
78. Longing for the past is running after the wind.
Something truly useless if we want to move forward.
79. Melancholy, like sadness, is a staining feeling. Joy seems to me to be the gift where we find ourselves. (Antonio Gala)
Melancholy and longing work in similar ways.
80. Twenty years is nothing. (Carlos Gardel)
Carlos Gardel’s classic tango tells us about the longing for past times and the feeling for an era that will never return.
81. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. (Dr. Seuss)
Sometimes sadness prevents us from appreciating the good things we have.
82. Everything reminds me of her.
The memory of that loved person can also bring us great doses of longing.
83. You were a child of fog almost in nothingness; name of my smile behind the soul. (Claudia Lars)
A truly beautiful poem by this great Salvadoran poet.
84. Because we can also long for our mistakes. (Ernesto Sabato)
No matter how much we have failed, sometimes we tend to remember a better past.
85. I don’t know what I miss more… Your kisses or your body. (Silvia Sago)
A verse that we can dedicate to that special person.
86. And yet, when I sleep without you, I dream of you. (Joaquín Sabina)
The absence of a loved one has generated and continues to generate feelings of longing, discomfort and suffering.
87. Going back to seventeen, after living a century, is like deciphering signs without being a competent sage. (Violeta Parra)
We all long to have a perennial youth.
88. The past is a long-distance candle: too close to let you go, too far to comfort you. (Amy Bloom)
A truly interesting reflection on the past.
89. True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disconnected memories. (Florence King)
Memory brings us great moments of longing, we must not allow it to dominate us.
90. There is no greater sadness than remembering, when you are in misery, a happy time. (Dante Alighieri)
