Quotes About Absence

Love can begin in a thousand ways—with a glance, a stare, a whisper or smile, a compliment, or an insult. It continues with caresses and kisses, or maybe frowns and fights. It ends with silence and sadness, frustration and rage, tears, and even, sometimes, joy and laughter. It can last just hours or days, or endure through years and beyond death. It is something we look for, or it finds us. It can be our salvation or our ruin. Its presence exalts us, and its loss or absence desolates us.

The queen, for the most part, is the unifying force of the community, if she removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.

The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.

The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness. —Man and Insects

The days he was away crept on tiny, unhurried feet.

For nearly two years, I'd worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin. In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find—my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn't shed.

Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn't know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who'd once filled it up. I didn't stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.

Now that she was gone, they loved her a lot better.

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Una fotografía es a la vez una pseudopresencia y un signo de ausencia.

It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices.

Someone is always at the door, no one is ever there.

People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.' Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976

The people she used to have, with whom she might have discussed losing her parents, were the parents she'd lost. But the larger truth was that she couldn't have talked to them about it anyway. Martin and Vivian had died that night, but they had been largely absent forever.

eso fue lo que me pasó: que estaba sola, me había quedado sola, ya no había nadie entre mi muerte y yo. Ser huérfano es eso: no hay nadie por delante, uno es el siguiente en la línea.

yo llevaba muchos años sin ellos, pero ahora ellos ya no estaban en ninguna parte. No sólo no estaban conmigo: no estaban en ninguna parte. Era como si se hubieran ausentado. Y como si me miraran, sí, esto es difícil de explicar, pero me miraban, Elaine y Ricardo me miraban. Es dura, la mirada de los ausentes.

Y eso se volvía más evidente conforme pasaba el tiempo, porque la mejor prueba de que una persona no va a volver es que no vuelva, ¿no?

Delia ya no estaría. Los objetos tienen una vida asombrosa en esas circunstancias.

quisieran matarme pensando volver a verte no hallarían de ti más que la esperanza de estar desnudo

Qué haré ahora con mis labios sin su boca para llenarlos? ¿Qué haré de mis adoloridos labios?

es precisamente esa ausencia de interés por la verdad –esa indiferencia ante el modo de ser de las cosas– lo que yo considero la esencia de la charlatanería." (Frankfurt, 2006: 44.).

Todo es distinto. Usted es distinto, ella es distinta... Volver tarde y mal, como usted, es peor que no volver.

Miss Rose in this demonstrating the peculiar talent of those who proclaim their absence of self-esteem for getting a lot of attention by pretending they never get any

Maternal absence, in one form or another, is always found in the background of the incest romance. Womens literature on incest generally treats the theme of maternal absence tragically. Mens literature trivializes it or treats it comically. And clinical literature tends to treat it judgmentally.