Desire strongly or persistently

Usage examples of longing.

Despite a conservative training--or because of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown--he swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally antique gray cottage in the sky.

I had the curious thought that these men were nostalgic for black-and-white, their longings dominated by achromatic values, personal extremes of postwar urban gray.

My mind wanders through adagios and andantes, gaping, longing to understand.

Everywhere Danlo looked, the faces of the man-swarm were bright with wonder and hope: one hundred thousand faces afire with longing, with the overwhelming need to be released from their suffering.

Beyond that tossing waste of water he knew Alata lay and although he realized that the centuries of his life had brought inevitable change, he was filled with such a longing for the land of his birth that it seemed his heart would burst.

I felt that the way she was talking would give her a liking for me, and I was satisfied that the man who can give birth to amorous desires is easily called upon to gratify them it was the reward I was ardently longing for, and I dared to hope it would be mine, although I could see it only looming in the distance.

A few of these might rekindle their passion for a while, but most would look for easier ways of annihilating the longing inside them.

Schliemann is like one in old times, who, while longing to tell of the Atrides and of Cadmus, yet allowed the chords of his heart to vibrate to softer influences, I will, while proposing his health, conjoin with his name that of his energetic fellow-explorer, Madame Schliemann.

In each particular human being we must admit the existence of the authentic Intellective Act and of the authentically knowable object--though not as wholly merged into our being, since we are not these in the absolute and not exclusively these--and hence our longing for absolute things: it is the expression of our intellective activities: if we sometimes care for the partial, that affection is not direct but accidental, like our knowledge that a given triangular figure is made up of two right angles because the absolute triangle is so.

One was a widow who had said bawdily that she was longing to feel a good man between her legs again.

He opened his heart to me, and begged me to plead for him with his sister to get her consent to his going to sea, for which he had a great longing.

By the Day-star of the World, my bereaved and longing heart is afire with a grief that is beyond my description.

Now Billy Brackett, though very fond of music, and possessed of an inextinguishable longing to produce melodious sounds, could not sing any more than Bim could.

His longing expression, followed by sheepish blushing, finished off one lingering doubt Maia had nursedthat Brod might just possibly be a spy, left here by the reavers to watch over the prisoners.

With an uprush of feeling that choked her, she realized with what deep longing she wanted central heating and inner-spring mattresses, supermarkets and intensive care, microwave pizzas and noisy, crowded, polluted cities where you could go out alone for the day without needing a troop of friends, all armed to the teeth, to ensure that you got home again.