Quotes About Absence

It's not that there is ever a shortage of people—oh, heavens no. It is merely that—as the years pass—there comes to be a terrible shortage of your people. The ones you loved.

THe church is full of flowers-yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth-and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. poking fun. Peering out.

He was simply gone, and he took all our peace with him.

It's a happy life and someone is missing.

Other attempts ensued. I was visited by streams of attentive nieces and nephews assuring me of their devotion—which had been demonstrated, over the past years, by their absence.

The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me.

Money, or the lack of it, pervaded the house as only something that is absent can

TENTH • Each pair in attendance will now receive an envelope containing a set of clues. No two sets of clues are alike. It is not what you have, it's what you don't have that counts.

Do we indeed desire the deadShould still be near us at our side?

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Myself, I thought about you the whole time. Even when I wasn't thinking about you, I thought about you.

To be included in someone's absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.

And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn't here at all. Then you phoned.

If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.

I want to go back to where I once lived, but it isn't there anymore; that one of me isn't here.

I seem to love you, though I never see you.

I am void of what you would expect.

Evaporated I've never been there.

Hurts so—That's just loss. This hole within—

somebody out not back being out again

nothing yet has a shadow every- thing is here but pale

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

What did dead mean, Ray wondered. It meant lost, it meant frozen, it meant gone.

I fell in love with you again; While you were away - Jack Salmon