Longing is such a commonplace word with such connotations of adolescent romanticism that at first it is not only hard to accept it as a key to spirituality, it is almost embarrassing.
But it belongs in the vocabulary of the soul because we live, as C. S. Lewis reminds us, with a "lifelong nostalgia . . . a longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off." It is that "old ache" that will not go away.
— John Kirvan, God Hunger