Quotes About Absence

“And now, my friends, a dragon's toast! Here's to life's little blessings: war, plagues, and all forms of evil. Their presence keeps us alert
and their absence keeps us grateful.”

— T.A. Barron

“Grief. The first is anticipatory. This is hospice grief. Prognostic grief. This is the grief that comes when you drive your dog to the vet for the very last time. This is the death row inmate's family's grief. See that pain in the distance? It's on its way. This is the grief that it is somewhat possible to prepare for. You finish all business. You come to terms. Goodbyes are said and said again. Anguish stalks the chambers of your heart and you steel yourself for the impending presence of an everlasting absence. This grief is an instrument of torture. It squeezes and pulls and presses down. Grief that follows an immediate loss comes on like a stab wound. This is the second kind of grief. It is a cutting pain and it is always a surprise. You never see it coming. It is a grief that can't be”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”

— Tahereh Mafi

“He stood at the foot of the grave, gloved hands clasped behind him, his dark clothes and hair blending into one black silhouette, as if he were not a presence but an absence, a hole cut out of the landscape.”

— Amanda DeWees

“I didn't understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur.”

— Gordon Dahlquist

“Darkness is only light's absence.
”

— Andrew Clements

“Then she decided she was ready to die.
But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments
in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,
and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veins
of the earth and placed where no man could see it,
because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone
through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep
with their eyes open, because the angels tremble
from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits
of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,
and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.”

— Eric Gamalinda

“Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling - I don't think it's any of that - it's helpless ... it's absence of control - and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that - I have no use for it whatsoever.
[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]”

— Toni Morrison

“It is not the absence of sin that makes you a believer.”

— Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

“Hurry is a thief, pure and simple.  And sometimes when we complain about the absence of certain things in our lives, we really aren't missing those things at all-rather, we just don't notice them when they're there because we fly right by them on our way to something else.”

— Tom Walsh

“Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot ... Junkies have no shame ... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido ... The junky's shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido ...”

— William S. Burroughs

“The people closest to him had learned to accept this absence,to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being.”

— Paul Auster

“When you open it up like that, you're effectively saying there is no right answer. And in the absence of a right answer, pluralism is the only option. And pluralism will lead to secularism, and to democracy, and to human rights. We must all focus on those values without worrying about whether atheism is the most intellectually pure approach. I genuinely believe that if we focus on the pluralistic nature of interpretation and on democracy, human rights, and secularism-on these values-we'll get to a time of peace and stability in Muslim-majority countries that then allows for conversations like this. Questioning whether God really exists would become a choice, open to all.”

— Sam Harris

“To love you is to love water that either parches the throat by its absence or drowns me with its anger!”

— Aleksandr Voinov

“Make that cage golden, it's still a fucking cage."
"Wel , in the absence of other options, gold will have to do.”

— Aleksandr Voinov

“Alyosha brought with him something his father had never known before: a complete absence of contempt for him and a consistent kindness, a perfectly natural, unaffected devotion to the old man who deserved so little.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“In a field, I am the absence of field. In a crowd, I am the absence of crowd. In a dream, I am the absence of dream. But I don't want to live as an absence. I move to keep things whole.”

— David Levithan

“The color white is the absence of memory.”

— Stephen King

“Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily - the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable.”

— Paul Bowles

“The alarming thing in China is the almost total absence of primary care. Even in cities, there are no independent doctors' offices or neighborhood clinics, so people have to go to the hospital for every health care need.”

— Nancy Travis

“Real peace is not only the absence of war but the presence of God .”

— Osunsakin Adewale

“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”

— Margaret Atwood

“And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers”

— Margaret Atwood

“Momma intended to teach Bailey and me to use the paths of life that she and her generation and all the Negroes gone before had found, and found to be safe ones. She didn't cotton to the idea that whitefolks could be talked to at all without risking one's life. And certainly they couldn't be spoken to insolently. In fact, even in their absence they could not be spoken of too harshly unless we used the sobriquet "They." If she had been asked and had chosen to answer the question of whether she was cowardly or not, she would have said that she was a realist.”

— Maya Angelou

“Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade. We see it in the suffering of civilian populations trapped by armed conflict or pervasive crime. We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians - including children, the most vulnerable of all.”

— Ban Ki-moon

“Maithanet carried a plague whose primary symptom was certainty. How the God could be equated with the absence of hesitation was something Achamian had never understood. After all, what was the God but the mystery that burdened them all? What was hesitation but a dwelling-within this mystery? Perhaps,”

— R. Scott Bakker

“You've so distracted me, your absence fans my love. Don't ask how. Then you come near. "Do not ... " I say, and "Do not ... ," you answer. Don't ask why this delights me.”

— Rumi

“First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life-oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.”

— Charles Stross

“Perhaps within me the desire to put off that which I most in the world desire of late keeps watch, I mean, to write a book but a wounded book, a contentious, broken book, a book not pleased to be a book, to be only a book, to be born in the absence of my friend, a book incapable of acting as if the last times were not upon us, but which at the same time cannot act as if it were only a book hence a being unaware of the end, unaware what time it is.”

— Hélène Cixous

“I never suffered from the absence of a father. On the contrary, as a child I was more inclined to see men as a disturbing factor. It made things difficult for me when I started working as a director.”

— Michael Haneke

“We often think of peace as the absence of war, that if powerful countries would reduce their weapon arsenals, we could have peace. But if we look deeply into the weapons, we see our own minds- our own prejudices, fears and ignorance. Even if we transport all the bombs to the moon, the roots of war and the roots of bombs are still there, in our hearts and minds, and sooner or later we will make new bombs. To work for peace is to uproot war from ourselves and from the hearts of men and women. To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

“Don't wait until you're faced with someone's absence to acknowledge the importance of their presence. Love them now. Realize that the flaws, irritations, bad habits, and imperfections are all a part of what makes them, and you, unique, special, and rare to this universe.”

— Mandy Hale

“Absence of proof isn't proof of absence.”

— Robert Buettner

“If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.”

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“A basic assumption shapes most Americans' mindset about labor: the belief that the death of unions isn't my problem because I'm not in a union. That assumption is wrong. Even if you aren't a member, your pay is influenced by the strength or weakness of organized labor. The presence of unions sets off a wage race to the top. Their absence sets off a race to the bottom.”

— Eric Liu

“Being fearless doesn't mean having an absence of fear. It means you press on in spite of fear.”

— Robin Parrish

“Many unsustainable behaviours are locked-in and made 'normal', not just by the way that we produce and consume, but by the absence of easy alternatives”

— Margaret Beckett

“Faith is the soul's witness to something not yet manifested, achieved or realised, but which yet the Knower within us, even in the absence of all indications, feels to be true or supremely worth following or achieving.”

— Sri Aurobindo

“Total depravity means the entire absence of holiness, not the highest intensity of sin. A totally depraved man is not as bad as he can be, but he has no holiness, that is, no supreme love of God”

— William Greenough Thayer Shedd

“Each time I wander into blogdom, I'm reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.' Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure.”

— Kathleen Parker

“You will reach a point where you can finally go for an hour, or a day, or a week without painful reminders of absence and emptiness. Look for new awakenings. Be open to rebirth.”

— Karen Katafiasz

“If you love someone, you are always joined with them
in joy, in absence, in solitude, in strife.”

— Rumi

“The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight against spiritual apathy in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a brief round of formal religious services once or twice every week. But of the great spiritual warfare - its watchings and strugglings, its agonies and anxieties, its battles and contests - of all things they appear to know nothing at all. Let us take care that this case is not our own.”

— J.C. Ryle

“Hell is God's Absence.”

— Edmund White

“There is a side of friendship that develops better and stronger by correspondence than contact ... The absence of the flesh in writing perhaps brings souls nearer.”

— Emily Carr

“If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.”

— Terence McKenna

“Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed. In the absence of new developments, old ones may seem very impressive for quite a long while.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

“Never have anything to do with likes and dislikes. The absence of what one likes is painful, as is the presence of what one dislikes. Therefore don't take a liking to anything. To lose what one likes is hard, but there are no bonds for those who have no likes and dislikes. From preference arises sorrow, from preference arises fear, but he who is freed from preference has no sorrow and certainly no fear.”

— Gautama Buddha

“The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities. Demonization is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction.”

— Henry A. Kissinger

“What we call pleasure, and rightly so is the absence of all pain.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero