Quotes About Absences

#1. I am not constructed for continued absences; I have never claimed to be constructed for them.

J.D. Salinger

#2. In a strange way', she thought, 'these absences suit my nature though not my heart. I love him, I miss him, but I have time to put on my humanity again.

Enid Bagnold

#3. History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.

Walter Benjamin

#4. With her high pale brow under her faded brown hair, she was like a rock washed clean by years of her husband's absences at conventions, dinners, committee meetings or simply at the office.

Louis Auchincloss

#5. There were more fights, more arguments, more yelling in the night, more long absences. Until it seemed as if anything would be better than living with these people who hated each other.

Esmeralda Santiago

#6. Absences can also make one forget. Absence dulls the memory and banishes those who are precious from the mind.

F. Sionil Jose

#7. You could look through the windows at any one of these people, but you would only ever see what was there, not what wasn't. The losses and absences didn't show, despite so often being the immovable facts around which a life orbited.

Alice Adams

#8. City squares are planned absences - they're defined, first of all, by what they're not [George Packer, "History: Influence on Humanity"].

Catie Marron

#9. . I want to say many things I must omit. It is not fit to wake the soul by tender strokes of art, or to ruminate upon happiness we might enjoy, lest absences become intolerable.

David McCullough

#10. Every one knows, that the mind will not be kept from contemplating what it loves in the midst of crowds and business. Hence come those frequent absences, so observable in conversation; for whilst the body is confined to present company, the mind is flown to that which it delights in.

Mary Astell

#11. We Burmese,' he began, 'are experts at looking for what's not there. It's something you should learn to do too. You must look for what's missing and learn how to find the truth in these absences.

Emma Larkin

#12. The marriage seemed to flourish on Father's extended absences. " Ragtime

E.L. Doctorow

#13. In the history of women's tennis the great players have come back from long absences with no problems.

Lindsay Davenport

#14. He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.

Richard Ford

#15. Darkness is the absence of light. Absences do not exist. Sin does not exist .

Rajneesh

#16. Yes, we are our fathers' sons and daughters, but we are not their choices. For despite their absences we are still here. Still alive, still breathing,
with the power to change this world, one little boy and girl at a time.

Daniel Beaty

#17. I was a shy, awkward sort of a boy and my father's frequent absences from home, along with my hero worship for him, made me even shyer.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

#18. Housman ran the same analysis for absences from work. The pattern was the same: Firefox and Chrome users were 19 percent less likely to miss work than Internet Explorer and Safari fans.

Adam M. Grant

#19. silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.

Anthony Doerr

#20. I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.

J.M. Coetzee

#21. Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness & ignorance, eyes made whole. An ignorance so vast that inside it all the world's wisdom could be contained & lost.

Clarice Lispector

#22. It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.

Nick Hornby

#23. I don't think life offers any greater experience than the joyful sense of recognition when one finds in a new acquaintance a real friend, or when an old relationship deepens into friendship, or when one finds an old friendship intact despite the passage of years and many absences.

Abigail McCarthy

#24. It suddenly seemed to Laurel that all the absences in her own life, every loss and sadness, every nightmare in the dark, every unexplained melancholy, took the shadowy form of the same unanswered question, something that had been there since she was sixteen years old - her mother's unspoken secret.

Kate Morton

#25. Wilderness holds an original presence giving expression to that which we lack, the losses we long to recover, the absences we seek to fill. Wilderness revives the memory of unity. Through its protection we can find faith in our humanity.

Terry Tempest Williams

#26. Only absences were fully shared.

Don DeLillo

#27. You can tell about people by their absences. By the shape of the emptiness they leave behind.

Elaine Clark McCarthy

#28. I was nerdy and really into computers. I was a good student until my senior year, when I started traveling and had a lot of absences.

Tony Hawk

#29. By the close of summer, with increasing losses from disease, desertions, and absences of one sort or other, his army was in serious decline. Spirits suffered. The patriotic fervor that had sent thousands rushing to the scene in late April and May was hardly evident any longer.

David McCullough

#30. Wives in their husbands' absences grow subtler, And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.

Lord Byron

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

#32. Because it is senior year I have begun to see things as potential absences. The things I love will become the things I'll miss.

David Levithan

#33. There were absences in my life which were a comfort, then were was a presence that ruined me.

Robert Pinget

#34. This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences

Azar Nafisi

#35. Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day. Dreaming of coffee. I'm afraid I didn't miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee.

Barbara Kingsolver

#36. What is gone is gone and will not come back. When the earth swallows, it swallows forever and we are left to stumble along feeling the absences. These are our burdens.

Nadia Hashimi