Absence Quotes

“There are empty rooms, and then there are rooms that feel crowded, corner to corner, with absence.”
― Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have--to want and want--how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, and to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

(Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter
dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht.
Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter,
daß, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.”
― Maurice Sendak

“People left, and if you loved too deeply, too fiercely, their swift and sudden absence could chill you to the soul.”
― Kristin Hannah, On Mystic Lake

“The moving force in Showing of Saying is Owning. It is what brings all present and absent beings each into their own, from where they show themselves in what they are, and where they abide according to their kind. This owning which brings them there, and which moves Saying as Showing in its showing we call Appropriation. It yields the opening of the clearing in which present beings can persist and from which absent beings can depart while keeping their persistence in the withdrawal.”
― Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language

“What if I tell you
my world collapsed
seeing you walk away,
what if I tell you that
the sky tear apart
in your absence,
what if I tell you
my world gets destroyed
in the silence between us
- ruined”
― Jyoti Patel, ANAMIKA: BEYOND WORDS

“I’ve lost something and I can’t describe
what it is
_____________

and what if that’s my job
to say how empty an absence is”
― Kenyatta Rogers

“Sometimes, you can only feel something by its absence.”
― Gayle Foreman

“Your chair at the table is empty and cold, you need to come home, I need someone to hold.”
― Avani Sharma

“Before bereavement, one might think of 'death' but not yet of 'absence'. Absence is inconceivable, as long as there is presence. For the bereaved, the world is defined by absence.”
― Esther Kinsky

“Eternal and forever are just silly
Seven-letter words for absence.”
― Jeff Alessandrelli, Fur Not Light

“We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“Yesterday, with you, is as close as today. But tomorrows without you, will always be far away.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Sadness that is caused by the absence of love
is deadly to the heart.”
― Laura Chouette

“Sadness that is caused by the absence of love is deadly for the heart.”
― Laura Chouette

“The biggest environmental change I noticed during COVID-19 was the absence of airplanes in the sky.”
― Steven Magee

“Saying is showing. In everything that speaks to us, in everything that touches us by being spoken and spoken about, in everything that gives itself to us in speaking, or awaits for us unspoken, but also in the speaking that we do ourselves, there prevails Showing which causes to appear what is present, and fade from appearance what is absent. Saying is in no way the linguistic expression added to the phenomena after they have appeared—rather, all radiant appearance and all fading away is grounded in the showing Saying. Saying sets all present beings free into their given presence, and brings what is absent into their absence. Saying pervades and structures the openness of that clearing which every appearance must seek out and every disappearance must leave behind, and in which every present or absent being must show, say, announce itself.”
― Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language

“I don’t wish to explain the existence of God, for the absence of Him does that quite well.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I mean imagine that shit. You bust your ass as a single parent, and your kid treats the absentee parent like a rock star. But love is like water and it slides over the smooth places. Sinks into the cracks.”
― NoNieqa Ramos, The Truth Is

“She reached across, grabbed my hand. I'm not going anywhere, Hig, she said. Where would I go?

Lots of places, I thought but I didn't say anything. To the other side for one. Or way way inside. A lot of places someone else can never follow.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Blanca came in and out of my life over the next few weeks, but she never came far enough for me to see her. I failed to meet her in so many different ways that I began to know her anyway. I knew the qualities of her particular absence. I dressed up for it. I wore a suit that I had never gotten the hang of in the seventies, but now it felt all right. It’s an unusual suit because it’s light beige, almost off-white. You don’t see that color much in big amounts, suit and jacket both. It became my uniform for not meeting Blanca.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“C'est fou comment le manque peut occuper une place aussi grande, un abîme qui risque un jour de m'emporter.”
― Wilfried N'Sondé, Aigre-doux

“I wondered if the space that a person occupies in the world survives the person themself.”
― Adriana Lisboa, Crow Blue

“But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition: Volume 2: 1943-1944

“I still bear the dolorous, after your absence;
I am helpless, to live with someone else;
I did not want gab, but I wanted your love;
I still feel the regret that it needs to assert.”
― Surya Raj

“The absence of things is so loud it pierces my brain with loss. What used to be, is simply no more.
But the memories linger like smoke in the air.”
― Gemma Amor, White Pines

“If I presume the flood that engulfs me to be bigger than the God who surrounds me, the real flood is the absence of my faith.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“When it comes to feeling, out of sight really is out of mind.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“This being is the other after the death of the Other - not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other.
The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference - something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other.
The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent.
Intelligence comes to us from the other - always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic - minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin.
Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine.
Does otherness survive anywhere after being banished from this entire psychodramatic superstructure?
Is there a physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena