All 11 Uses of
yearn
in
Black Boy
- I crossed restlessly to the window and pushed back the long fluffy white curtains—which I had been forbidden to touch—and looked yearningly out into the empty street.†
Chpt 1.1yearningly = with strong desire
- I yearned to become invisible, to stop living.†
Chpt 1.1yearned = strongly desired
- There was the yearning for identification loosed in me by the sight of a solitary ant carrying a burden upon a mysterious journey.†
Chpt 1.1 *yearning = strongly desiring; or a strong desire
- Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.†
Chpt 1.2
- The church's spiritual life must have been polluted by my base yearnings, by the leaping hunger of my blood for the flesh, because I would gaze at the elder's wife for hours, attempting to draw her eyes to mine, trying to hypnotize her, seeking to communicate with her with my thoughts.†
Chpt 1.4yearnings = strong desires
- The routine of the house flowed on as usual; for me there was sleep, mush, greens, school, study, loneliness, yearning, and then sleep again.†
Chpt 1.5yearning = strongly desiring; or a strong desire
- In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed.†
Chpt 1.7
- Or had a black boy spoken of yearning to get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, his friends—in the boy's own interest—would have reported his odd ambition to the white boss.†
Chpt 1.10
- When the yearning to leave would become strong in me, I could not keep out of my mind the image of a storehouse at a near-by Negro college that held huge cans of preserved fruits.†
Chpt 1.10
- But how could a man build a life upon vague, unformed yearnings?†
Chpt 1.13yearnings = strong desires
- There were about forty Negro actors and actresses in the theater, lolling about, yearning, disgruntled, not knowing what to do with themselves.†
Chpt 2.19yearning = strongly desiring; or a strong desire
Definition:
have a strong desire -- often for something difficult or impossible to have