Yearning for Change Quotes

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.

The most depressing thing is the political slogan: there is no alternative. But there is.

On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

Desire, despair, desire. So many monsters.

The American people are desperately seeking a Moses to lead them out of the wilderness, back to the land of milk and honey. They thought maybe Barack Obama was the one, and when he proved to be mortal after all, they were willing to listen to anyone new.

I wasn't certain of anything anymore, except that New Orleans was a faithless friend and I wanted to leave her.

For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured-disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui-in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

And I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself.

I didn't feel that so much as an outsider when I started writing; I've felt that way all my life. I don't know, man; I guess I was just wired wrong. When I was growing up, I always wanted to be somebody else and live somewhere else. I've always felt a little uncomfortable around people. And I'm not trying to romanticize this, because it wasn't romantic. I wasn't trying to be a rebel; I just always felt a little out of it. I think that's why it's pretty easy for me to identify with people living on the margins.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning.

The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!

Do you ever feel like 'nothing' has happened to you? Like you know you have a destiny, but all you've seen of life so far is unexceptional? I want my life to be different. I want to feel that it's begun. I'm waiting for 'that' kiss.

No matter who you are, there is always some part of you that wishes you were someone else, and when, for a millisecond, you get that wish, it's a miracle.

...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

There's definitely anger, the demand of more from the world, a demand for justice. There's no other way I can perform the vocals than the way you hear them. It's not just the words, it's what is being felt.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

I walked around Soho's street for over an hour, running into familiar faces but never once stopping to chat. It was then that I felt something discomforting and comforting all at once. I didn't want to be here, in this city, anymore.

Human nature craves novelty.

One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common--discontent.

We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.

I have this idyllic love life, but my mind just won't accept that. I would like to bring a new guy home every night. I try to make humor out of that situation.

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.