“How do we quell the longing that seemingly never ceases? You don’t. The longing is your love, and love isn’t meant to be contained or quelled. The only thing that makes the longing more bearable is simply expecting it, and accepting it as a normal part of your life after death.”

Grief Is Love Marissa Renee

“It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine…where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home?”

Cs lewis till we have faces

“Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know. Out of our longing for meaning came all of art: out of our longing for truth all science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names–Susan Cain calls it ‘the bittersweet’ and Portuguese has the lovely word saudade; the vague, constant longing for something or someone beyond the horizon of reality–but we recognize it in our marrow, in the strata of the soul beyond the reach of words.”

Maria Popova, from: “The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing,” The Marginalian (3 September 2022)

“But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning ‘to grow long,’ and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion. The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act.”

Bittersweet Susan Cain

“Gregory the Great spoke about compunctio, the holy pain, the grief somebody feels when face with that which is most beautiful. . . . The bittersweet experience stems from human homelessness in an imperfect world, human consciousness of, and at the same time, a desire for, perfection. This inner spiritual void becomes painfully real when faced with beauty. There, between the lost and the desired, the holy tears are formed.”
Owe wikstrom quoted bittersweet by Susan cain

The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it’s also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.
Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.
Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.
Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil’s Coming

But I believe that the grand unifying theory that explains the paradox of tragedy is (like most such theories) deceptively simple: We don’t actually welcome tragedy per se. What we like are sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. We don’t thrill to lists of sad words, for example, or slide shows of sad faces (researchers have actually tested this). What we love is elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love. The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms.
Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.
Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

Endings will give way to beginnings just as much as beginnings give way to endings. Your ancestor’s life ended, and yours could begin. Yours will come to an end, and your child’s story will take center stage. Even within the course of your life, pieces of you will constantly die off—a job will be lost, a relationship will end—and, if you’re ready, other occupations, loves, will arise in their place. What follows may or may not be “better” than what came first. But the task is not only to let the past go, but also to transform the pain of impermanence into creativity—and transcendence.
Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we’re really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we’re forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn’t eat life in order to survive.
Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole