Quotes About Absence

His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.

But the absence of bad motives in no way alleviates the bad effects.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence.

I realized that my mother was at the center of my work, because now that my mother is no longer there, there's nobody left.

It's sometimes better to have a father figure to rebel against than nothing, than just a black hole or an absence.

Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?

It's not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it's health in our absence: it's more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.

My father was absent and he was a hero to me.

Yes, it did look like 'where did she go?' I was hiding.

Not for a moment had I been afraid. It is true that whoever would cross the threshold of any world, must leave fear behind him; but, for myself, I could claim no part in its absence. No conscious courage was operant in me; simply, I was not afraid. I neither knew why I was not afraid, nor wherefore I might have been afraid. I feared not even fear—which of all dangers is the most dangerous.

Many feelings are simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence

his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went.

Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.

Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

He is simply a hole in the air.

Le parfum de l'âme, c'est le souvenir. C'est la partie la plus délicate, la plus suave du coeur, qui se détache pour embrasser un autre coeur et le suivre partout. L'affection d'un absent n'est plus qu'un parfum, mais qu'il est doux.

Le mal du pays fait cet effet-là à tout le monde : il transforme les objets de nos souvenirs en idéalités poétiques, dont les qualités grandissent à nos yeux, tandis que les défauts s'adoucissent toujours avec le temps et l'absence, et vont jusqu'à s'effacer dans notre imagination.

There was no moon.

Starry sky my sister cursed men star your death the light of a great cold solitude of lightning absence of humanity at last I empty myself of memories a desert sun effaces my name star I see its silence ice it cries out like a wolf on my back I fall to the ground it kills me I guess.

if I did not love death my suffering my desire for you would kill me your absence your distress make me nauseous it's time for me to love death it's time to bite its hands

The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass. I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens. It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.