A Quote by Lisa See

What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.

Lisa See

Quote Topics

Cannot General Longing Loss Me Most Past Relieved Sense Stays

Quote Author

Lisa See
American - Novelist
Born: February 18, 1955

Longing is the fullest sense of desire; it's the most deeply felt kind of desire. I think the most interesting artwork comes out of some sense of longing. It could be called dissatisfaction; it could be called distance. There are many kinds of wanting to get closer to something else, whether that is an idea, a body, a place. Longing is also one of the conditions people approach reading, visual art, or music with - it's to satisfy that sense of longing. It's part of my job, on some level, to grapple with that notion.

Tom Burr

For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.

Madeleine L'Engle

In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind,...The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.

David Richo

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

Romesh Gunesekera

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

Meghan O'Rourke

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Susan Sontag

There's a tremendous amount of language loss. Most of the attention is given to indigenous languages, which makes sense, but some of the most dramatic language loss is in Europe.

Noam Chomsky

The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all.

Bret Anthony Johnston

Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.

Frederick Douglass

Hate crimes are different from other crimes. They strike at the heart of one's identity - they strike at our sense of self, our sense of belonging. The end result is loss - loss of trust, loss of dignity, and in the worst case, loss of life.

James Comey

If you cannot be at ease with yourself when alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.

Eckhart Tolle

What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.

Irena Klepfisz

Widge can see the past." Poppet says suddenly. "That's why his stories are so good." "The past is easier," Widget says. "It's already there." "In the stars?" Bailey asks. "No." Widget says. "On people. The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it's still there, the events and t hings that pushed you to where you are now.

Erin Morgenstern

Don't we all look back in longing, those of us who had happy childhoods? Because the greatest loss we ever know is not the loss of family or place or money, it is the loss of innocence. There is forever a hollow place in our hearts once we realize that darkness rings the campfire.

Carolyn Hart

Feeling in love (or lust) and fear feel a lot alike. They both give you that anxious butterfly feeling in your stomach, a sense of excitement, and a general unease physically and mentally. It's easy to confuse love with fear.