Saudade is still my favorite.

  • Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.
  • forelsket: The euphoria you experience when you’re first falling in love.
  • gezellig: cozy, communal feeling, like the warm sensation one has surrounded by good friends at a long meal, with the conversation flowing; the energy of a good party
  • hiraeth: a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.
  • Hyggelig/hygge (Danish): more than coziness. Friends, warm fire.
  • la douleur exquise (French): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have.
  • mamihlapinatapei (Yagan): the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start.
  • mono no aware (Japanese): awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and a gentle sadness or wistfulness at their passing
  • onsra: to love for the last time
  • retrouvailles (French): The happiness of meeting again after a long time.
  • saudade (Spanish): a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return.
  • sehnsucht: thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. It has been referred to as “life’s longings”; or an individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes.
  • Ya’aburnee (Arabic): “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.
  • yǒu yuán wú fèn, 有緣無份, (Chinese): "Have fate without destiny," fated to come together, but not destined to stay together

Uitwaaien Dutch - The pleasure of walking in windy weather. Nervio: "a feeling of such intense affection that one trembles or grits his teeth with restraint so as not to harm the object of his affection." spannungsbogen - a German word with lots of range. It is a kind of tension toward action-potential, but with an incredible precision built into the notion. For these reasons it has also come to be used in situations of noteworthy self-control.

Author Frank Herbert famously described it as "The self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing" and a German friend of mine called it the energy at the elbow of a drawn bowstring.

mañana - I've heard that in some contexts this Spanish word, meaning 'tomorrow,' means 'the tomorrow that will never come.' In other words, a tomorrow that we each hope and long for because the hope of it inspires us despite the impossibility / unlikelihood of its arrival. Sad Inat - (Serbian, pronounced "eenat") It is more of an attitude of proud defiance, stubbornness and self-preservation - sometimes to the detriment of everyone else or even oneself. searching for: a word to describe how I feel when I am climbing a mountain and look down into Yosemite Valley, so full of vibrant green life and cool hidden brooks, and I feel the solidness and timelessness and enormity of the granite stone around me. the complement to being aware of the mono no aware of myself. ! Perhaps this is "duende" from Spanish, originally used to describe a mythical, spritelike entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one’s surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to “the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.”

jul 3 2013 ∞
sep 7 2013 +