Quotes About Abandonment

That spring he found the old bear, dead, in one of the caves. He slept beside the body. He dreamed the bear was his father. That was when he gave up being human. He gave her up as well.

I'll know that sometimes those who love you best are the ones who leave you behind.

Here you are, Shelby tells Buddy. So now you know, she's not coming back. Not if you wait for a hundred years. She's left you and you're all alone, so get used to it.

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

Do you know how alone I've always felt?

The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.

Did people leave you, did their spirits simply take off, because you wouldn't read a book that turned them on? He now knew the answer was yes.

Don't you dare show me any fear, they seemed to say to one another. Act like nothings happening that I should be frightened of! [...] this is what civilization really meant. What it came to, in the end. Abandonment of the animal fear of annihilation, the scent of suffering. Not wanting to see it in others, not wanting to face it in yourself.

was the one who was left behind who did most of the missing.

She was so alone. Dead to the world. No one to love. No one who loved her.

When you are small, if you reach out, and nobody takes your hand, you stop reaching out, and reach inside, instead. — Amanda Eyre Ward, How to Be Lost . (Ballantine Books; Reprint edition August 30, 2005)

Over all was that air of abandonment and decay which seems nowhere so fit and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.

Logen still remembered the first time he had to leave someone behind, remembered it like it was yesterday. Strange how the boy's name had gone but the face was with him still.

What do we leave behind but things not done, not said, not finished? Empty clothes, empty rooms, empty spaces in the ones who knew us? Mistakes never made right and hopes rotted down to nothing?

I find hope is best abandoned early,' muttered Temple.

You turn to shit, alright. But maybe you can leave something good behind you.' She barked empty laughter at him. 'What do we leave behind but things not done, not said, not finished? Empty clothes, empty rooms, empty spaces in the ones who knew us? Mistakes never made right and hopes rotted down to nothing?

It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others.

That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.

She was down the street and around the corner when she realized she hadn't put anything on besides the jacket and her boots. She was tramping around greater Denver at two in the morning in her faded pink panties. At least she had remembered the whiskey.

It's like . . . a house after someone moves out. The house is still there, but all their stuff is gone. Someone took away the furniture and rolled up the rugs. The movers crated all the parts of Shelly Beukes up and shipped her away. There's just not much left of her anymore except the empty house.

Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.