This was nonsense, he thought. The need of her was a physical thing, like the thirsty of a sailor becalmed for weeks on the sea. He'd felt the need before, often, often, in their years apart. But why now? She was safe; he knew where she was - was it only the exhaustion of the past weeks and days, or perhaps the weakness of creeping age that made his bones ache, as though she had in fact been torn from his body, as God had made Eve from Adam's rib?
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died. " My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?
Hearts are united when they ache and break together.
Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
November’s a burn and an ache.
Some men make money not for the sake of living, but ache In the blindness of greed and live just for their fortune's sake.
We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.
My purpose, my whole life, had been to love him and be with him, to make him happy. I didn’t want to cause any unhappiness now—in that way, I decided it was probably better than he wasn’t here to see this, though I missed him so much at that moment the ache of it was as bad as the strange pains in my belly.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand.
My conscience aches but it's going to lose the fight.
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.
Love is the possibility of possibilities. Its farthest reach is beyond us, no matter how long we love or how much. It will always remain the mute mystery to whose ecstasy and ache we can only surrender with a yes.
[On being criticized for her serious expression:] I simply ache from smiling. Why are women expected to beam all the time? It's unfair. If a man looks solemn, it's automatically assumed he's a serious person, not a miserable one.
The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.
What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names - now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.
I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.
Churches and trains they all look the same to me now they shoot you some place while we ache to come home somehow.
Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly. . . perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.