I love this quote from Marilynne Robinson's
Housekeeping—an exquisite, poetical book that feels more like an extended evocation of mood than a narrative.
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
This was my email signature line for a long time, and I still find it a compelling statement of the power of desire and imagination and dreams.
