John Steinbeck Quotes

What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air - you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all consuming - a physical pain.

I want to feel passion, I want to feel pain. I want to weep at the sound of your name. Come make me laugh, come make me cry... just make me feel alive.

I dream of you to wake; would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on.

Longing, for everyone, is always there, isn't it? More intense at some times than others. You get closer to less longing - an odd metaphoric phrasing, I realize - then, you are further and longing more than ever again.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

I dote on his very absence.

The thing that makes love stories work, in my opinion, in movies and novels and country & western songs, is the feeling of longing.

Everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.

Over the years I’ve collected a thousand memories of you, every glimpse, every word you’ve ever said to me. All those visits to your family’s home, those dinners and holidays—I could hardly wait to walk through the front door and see you.” The corners of his mouth quirked with reminiscent amusement. “You, in the middle of that brash, bull-headed lot…I love watching you deal with your family. You’ve always been everything I thought a woman should be. And I have wanted you every second of my life since we first met.

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

Up on the roof Tatiana thought about the evening minute, the minute she used to walk out the factory doors, turn her head to the left even before her body turned, and look for his face. The evening minute as she hurried down the street, her happiness curling her mouth upward to the white sky, the red wings speeding her to him, to look up at him and smile.

I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.

When I dream, I dream of him.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

There's no ifs and buts or maybes, you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my loving.

Words have no language which can utter the secrets of love; and beyond the limits of expression is the expounding of desire.

You're only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?

When I see ya baby girl, I miss feelin on ya. I miss everything that's real about ya and that's everything about ya, that's just how I feel about ya

Love is . . .” An old memory with Adrian came back to me, and some of the turbulent emotion I always carried within me these days welled up in my chest. It was stupid, feeling so lovesick when he’d been gone less than a day, but I couldn’t get him or the ways he described love out of my head. “. . . a flame in the dark. A breath of warmth on a winter’s night. A star that guides you home.

She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.

I'm just the mere shadow of my former selfishness. I crave the silhouette of your kiss.

I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.