Quotes About Absence

The press had had the story of the severed leg since six that morning. Wardle had kept his word to Strike and warned him ahead of time. The detective had been able to leave his attic flat in the small hours with enough clothes in his holdall for a few days' absence. He knew the press would soon be staking out the office, and not for the first time

Gone. and it was completely. Everyone I'd every known, every place I'd ever been. My Mother. My father. Rebecca. Out of site. Out of mind.

The most important relationship of presence to combat absence will be in the Eucharist.

The variable that marks some periods as barren and some as rich in prophetic vision is in the interest, the level of seeking, the responsiveness of the hearers. The variable is not in the presence or absence or the relative quality and force of the prophetic voices. The prophet grows in stature as people respond to his message...It is the seekers, then, who make the prophet.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

There were no more heroes. Kennedy was dead, shot by an assassin in Dallas. Batman and Robin were dead... Superman was missing...

Of course I long for her, but in honesty I must say that I would rather long for her than have her continuously present. Travel agents assure us that 'getting there is half the fun'; I might say with at least equal truth that longing is some of the best of loving.

I think our love was all the better for being stretched out by our necessity to study hard to keep up with our work. To have all the time in the world to devote to love may be idyllic for a summer, but linked sweetness long drawn out is the greater luxury. [...] During these summer absences, I longed for her, and wrote to her, and loved her more than ever, abstinence sharpening the appetite.

Because he's not here. Does that answer your question?

The ghosts . . . try to remember the sunlight. Light has died out of their skies.

Absence is a house so transparent that I, lifeless, will see you, living, and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.

The shadows will not bear me away, for there are no Shadows here.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

Mourning. At the death of the loved being, acute phase of narcissism: one emerges from sickness, from servitude. Then, gradually, freedom takes on a leaden hue, desolation settles in, narcissism gives way to a sad egoism, an absence of generosity.

To induce a collective content for the imagination is always an inhuman undertaking, not only because dreaming essentializes life into destiny, but also because dreams are impoverished, and the alibi of an absence.

A cold winter night. I'm warm enough, yet I'm alone. And I realize that I'll 'have' to get used to existing quite 'naturally' within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, 'fastened to' the presence of absence.

But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?

Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved's absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. The singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense is: a pure portion of anxiety.

I never know the loved being's voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside my head, way past the ear; a tenuous yet monumental voice, since it is one of those objects which exist only once they have disappeared

A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally , a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence

Historiquement, le discours de l'absence est tenu par la Femme : la Femme est sédentaire, l'Homme est chasseur, voyageur; la Femme est fidèle (elle attend), l'homme est coureur (il navigue, il drague). C'est la Femme qui donne forme à l'absence, en élabore la fiction, car elle en a le temps ; (…)

Cosa rara, su voz que conocía tan bien, de la que se dice que es el grano mismo del recuerdo (" la querida inflexión..."), no la oigo. Como una sordera localizada...