The phrase "strange longing" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe an unusual or intense desire for something, often evoking a sense of nostalgia or yearning.
Example: "As she gazed at the old photographs, a strange longing filled her heart, reminding her of the days gone by."
Alternatives: "unusual desire" or "peculiar yearning."
We came to know him as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies".
Holden Caulfield was cool, sensitive, tough, troubled, funny, smart, tender, filled with strange longings, confused and difficult.
Each, however, would do the other the honour of an affectionate fictional portrait: Dill, Scout's friend in To Kill a Mockingbird, "whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings and quaint fancies", is based on Capote, while the tomboyish Idabel, in Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is his tribute to Lee.
There is something strangely intimate in singing about the country that bore you, in voicing that great mingling of love and resentment, that strange ache of longing for a land that is ugly and tarnished and cruel, and yet still somehow belongs to us: "To you, England, I cling," Harvey sings.
Anne Peile's Repeat it Today with Tears (Serpent's Tail) – a strange tale of longing and loneliness set in 1970s London – has the quality I rate most highly in a first novel, indeed any novel: I never knew what was going to happen next and I believed every single word.
Will this future reader, leafing through an old book, experience a strange, intuitive twinge of longing as he wonders what it means to be "happy as a lark"?
It lays out so nakedly, and with such persuasive power, certain mythic patterns in young male longing: that "strange twisted maze of desire and refusal" that can feel so baffling and bruising, on the receiving end.
In "Love is Strange," he found beautiful longing in the silence of a elderly couple unaccustomed to spending nights apart.
And, like Mankiewicz's film, Hong's puts its elaborate device of memory to direct, strongly emotional ends; it's a surprisingly funny film (as the title suggests) about the pain of longing and the strange twists that unexpected love gives a life's path.
