A Quote by Sylvia Townsend Warner

But what are wishes, compared with longings?

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Quote Topics

Compared Wishes

Quote Author

Sylvia Townsend Warner
English - Novelist
December 6, 1893 - May 1, 1978

Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.

Frank Herbert

Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?

Amos Oz

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

God wishes to be seen, wishes to be sought, wishes to be expected, and wishes to be trusted.

John Ortberg

Strive to see God in all things without exception. Do not smother yourself...If you start smothering yourself with a host of cares and longings and wishes ... you will be disabling yourself from serving God with all your heart.

Saint Francis de Sales

The sight of a child…will arouse certain longings in adult, civilized persons — longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out of the total picture in favor of the adapted persona.

Carl Jung

I could go on to speak of sanity as compared with insanity, decency as compared with vandalism, friendship as compared with rabies.

Kurt Vonnegut

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

Michael Ignatieff

Wishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in it's changing and change with it.

Catherynne M. Valente

The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. God wishes, said Calvin, that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory.

Eric Hoffer

I think that compared to other politicians who have been put in jail in the past, compared to the human-rights activists in history who have had to face political prosecution, the activists in Hong Kong nowadays are already quite lucky compared to that.

Joshua Wong

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

Richard Ford

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

Herbert Read

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

Georges Bataille

You don't choose your themes; they choose you. The meaning of your stories will rise out of your deepest longings, often out of longings so deep that you haven't admitted them even to yourself. Your convictions, your confusions, your most passionate dreams will be there whenever you begin a story, so you might as well learn to tap into them.