Quotes About Presence

10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

She hates the way the people part to let them past and then, behind them, regroup, erasing their passage, as if it were nothing, as if it never were. She wishes to scratch the ground, perhaps with a hoe, to score the streets beneath her, so that there will forever be a mark, for it always to be known that this way Hamnet came. He was here.

She glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time. I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back to where we were, when she was living and breathing.

So it follows, of course, that she will be here now, in whatever form she can manage. Agnes does not need to turn her head, does not want to frighten her away. It is enough to know that she is there, manifest, hovering, insubstantial. I see you, she thinks. I know you are here.

He inhales: the aroma of wood, of lime, of something sweet and fibrous. Also a chalky, musky undertone. And the woman beside him: he can smell her hair and skin, one of which carries the faint scent of rosemary

I will send word,' he says, behind her, and she starts. She had almost forgotten he was there. What was it he had been saying? 'Send word?' she repeats. 'To whom?' 'To you.' 'To me? Why?' She gestures down at herself. 'I am here before you.

fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives . . . The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

Is this what it feels like to die, to sense the nearness of something you can't avoid?

A bee drones by, scribbling on the air near their heads...

September 11 Never a trial that He is not there. Never a burden that He does not bear. Never a sorrow that He does not share. Moment by moment I'm under His care. —D.W.Whittle

You should slow down. Learn to enjoy the journey. You never really get where you're going, anyway.

The kingdom of heaven is like electricity. You don't see it. It is within you.

The image of love reveals itself there; in a profoundly present absence.

And we have the night ahead of us to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream did its job and, like a postman, hurried on to someone else. So we have to be worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us.

Do not be absent for too long, then come and ask about how I am, details die with time and stories change.

So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny? You and I are absent, you and I are present and absent. So which of your Lord's favors do you two deny?

I am here. Anything more than that is rumor and slander

Do not be absent for too long, then come and ask about how am, details die with time and stories change.

If you asked me how many times you came in my mind, I would say once. Because you came, and never left.

I don't. If it mattered to me even one bit, I wouldn't be here with you, Nakano-san!

So? You think people stop talking to you when they are dead?

I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.