Quotes About Absence

People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark.

What would your mother think about that?" which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can't say anything to people who are dead and dead people can't think.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.

Whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out of the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

He continually thought of Lucy. But he did not think anything definite about her. He merely thought of her.

But yet his thoughts were very tender to her. Nothing reopens the springs of love so fully as absence, and no absence so thoroughly as that which must needs be endless. We want what we have not; and especially that which we can never have.

As yet, he was barely thirty, and had he been able to judge his own case as keenly as he could have judged the case of another, he would have known that a short absence might probably raise his value in the estimation of others rather than lower it. But his personal annoyance was too great to allow of his making such calculations aright.

The case dragged itself on slowly, and little Anna Murray was a child of nine years old when at last the Earl was acquitted of the criminal charge which had been brought against him. During all this time he had been absent. Even had there been a wish to bring him personally into court, the law

Le début de l'amour, c'est toujours lorsque non seulement on est heureux de la présence de la personne qu'on chérit, mais qu'on l'aime rien que de souvenir, quand elle est absente.

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.

The absence of the latter means nothing, though its presence may mean everything

On the contrary, I have been to Devonshire. In spirit? Exactly. My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco. After you left I sent down to Stamford's for the

I nearly resent these things I have described, because they are life without you. [It] is so long. If I could only see you.

Now what was here, she wondered, what was here and is gone, or what was going to be here and never came?

When the chicken fat runs out, all that's left is an empty hole.

When you were still here, Isobe thought, death seemed so far removed from me. It was as though you stood with both arms outstretched, keeping death from me. But now that you're gone, suddenly it seems right here in front of me.

In mourning, I realized the most painful place on earth was sometimes the church you attended with the person you loved, the person now gone.

El hecho de que uno entable correspondencia con el ausente, con quien no puede hablar, no es menos natural que el de tratar de hacerse entender por escrito cuando uno ha perdido la voz.

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.

To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well.

Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down.

Uno no puede responder con nada a la ausencia.