Restlessness Quotes

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa , The Book of Disquiet

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

“I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand. We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.”
― Hugo Claus

“Don’t you know what that is? It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Detective

“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun's melting rays. Dreams and a restlessness of the soul came to him.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.”
― Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict

“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“When you are lonely for a while don't get restless, if you had born alone, you are going to die alone then for sometime you can certainly live alone.”
― Amit Kalantri

“The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.”
― Meindert DeJong, The Little Cow and the Turtle

“It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.
This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...
I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“It incinerates unceasingly, trying
smiling in illusion of being alive;
it keeps broiling continuously
and restlessly sparkles around
like a blaze of lighting flame,
life is melting down
like a candle that is flickering around.”
― Suman Pokhrel, मलाई जिन्दगी नै दुख्दछ [Malai Zindagi Nai Dukhdachha]

“But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“In the morning, she was not sure that she had slept as much as lived a set of vivid dreams, letting them linger so that she would not have to open her eyes and see the room.”
― Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

“All of them had a restlessness in common.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?”
― Stewart O'Nan, Songs for the Missing

“Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it - and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“States of the atmosphere pass into us as water through the meshes of a sieve, and storms occur in us before they break upon the world without, creating restless sensations. ("Absolute Evil")”
― Julian Hawthorne, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.”
― Louis Simpson, People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-1983

“The bag was a hybrid I had picked up at a store called Suitcase City while I was plotting my comeback. [...] It had a logo on it -- a mountain ridgeline with the words "Suitcase City" printed across it like the Hollywood sign. Above it, skylights swept the horizon, completing the dream image of desire and hope. I think that logo was the real reason I liked the bag. Because I knew Suitcase City wasn't a store. It was a place. It was Los Angeles.”
― Michael Connelly, The Brass Verdict