A Passage from Steinbeck

I started reading The Log From the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck this evening, and came across a few lines:

"We said good-bye again and again and still could not bring ourselves to cast off the lines and start the engines. It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist."