Love & Longing
Quotes about missing someone
For someone far away, someone gone, someone you can’t call.
Missing someone is strange. They’re not here, and yet they’re in everything: the empty chair, the song in the shop, the joke you have no one to tell. Long distance, a breakup, a death, a friendship that drifted. Poets have been writing this feeling for as long as there’s been writing.
“When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind.”
Amy Lowell, from her poem “The Taxi.”
The many kinds of missing
- Missing someone far away. The ache of distance, and of time zones.
- Missing someone you can’t have. The longing that has nowhere to go.
- Missing someone who died. Where missing becomes grief. See grief quotes.
- Missing who you were together. What the Portuguese call saudade.
Writers who knew the feeling
- Amy Lowell, on going away
- Rumi, on the house without the beloved
- Madame de Sévigné, writing to her absent daughter
- Sara Teasdale, on remembering
- Hafiz, on the one who left
- Rabindranath Tagore, on far-away things
Their lines arrive one a day in Saudade’s Love & Longing thread.
Saudade gives you one line of poetry or literature a day, chosen by a person, from writers who felt it first. Then a private page to write what it brings up. Nobody reads it but you, and over the weeks your pages become a book of your own.
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