Quotes About Absence

I couldn't tell wether the hole that opened up inside me was from missing you or from the change of season

Ella ya sólo existe en mis recuerdos. Se ha ido de mi lado. Estaba aquí, pero ha desaparecido. Y allí no hay término medio. Donde no hay lugar para el compromiso no puede haber un término medio. Los quizá tal vez existan al sur de la frontera. No al oeste del sol.

He followed his daily routine, and she followed hers. But without her there, Tengo noticed a human-shaped void she had left behind.

Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it.

Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.

Now that I can no longer see you, I realize how much I needed you

It was still inchoate, something missing. Something that should be there was appealing to the nonvalidity of absence. And that missing element was rapping on the glass window separating presence and absence. I could make out its wordless cry.

With Naoko gone, I went to sleep on the sofa. I hadn't intended to do so, but I fell into the kind of deep sleep I had not in a long time, filled with a sense of Naoko's presence. In the kitchen were the dishes Naoko ate from, in the bathroom was the toothbrush Naoko used, and in the bedroom was the bed in which Naoko slept. Sleeping soundly in this apartment of hers, I wrung the fatigue from every cell of my body, drop by drop. I dreamed of a butterfly dancing in the half-light.

A bit of shape and form has disappeared from the world, increasing the amount of nothingness.

I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.

And she leaves. She opens the door and, without a backward glance, goes out and shuts the door. I stand at the window and watch her go. She vanishes in the shadow of a building. Hands resting on the sill, I gaze for the longest time at where she disappeared. Maybe she forgot something she wanted to say and will come back. But she never does. All that's left is an absence that's like a hollow space.

So once you're dead there's just nothing? Basically.

Dentro de mi, alguien, algo, se irá. Con la mirada baja, sin una palabra.

I stepped out of the shower and dried my hair, rubbed on body lotion, cleaned my ears. Then to the kitchen to heat up the last of the coffee. Only to discover: no one sitting at the opposite side of the table. Staring at that chair where no one sat, I felt like a tiny child in a De Chirico painting, left behind all alone in a foreign country.

If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. Don't you think so? They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words.

Everything seems pointless since you left

If thinking is an intellectual response to a problem, then the absence of a problem leads to the absence of thinking.

Dee Dee?" Mildred's voice could sharpen pencils. "Where are you?

Out of sight, out of mind. The absent are always in the wrong.

If your dad died before you were born, yeah, it hurts - but it's not like you had a connection with something that was real. Not to say it's any better - but to have that connection and then have it ripped away was, like, the worst. My dad was such a good dad that when he left, he left a huge scar. He was my superhero.

I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons.

I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when I get ready to write, I think I'm trying to fill that.

My divorce came to me as a complete surprise. That's what happens when you haven't been home in eighteen years.

Our family always had animals, but they became more important to me as the years passed because they helped me deal with the absence of love.