absence quotes

  •    When Icame back to Dublin,Iwas courtmartialled inmy absence and sentenced to death in myabsence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

    - Brendan Francis Behan
      The Hostage, act1.

  •    Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

    -John Peter Berger
      In New Statesman and Society,15  Jul.

  • L'absence est a'   l'amour ce qu'est au feu le vent; Il e  teint le petit, il allume le grand. Absence is to love what wind is to fire; It extinguishes the small, it kindles the great.

    - Comte de Bussy-Rabutin
      Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules. Maximes d'Amour, pt.2.

  • L'absence diminue les me  diocres passions, et augmente les grandes,comme le vent e  teint les bougies, et allume le feu. Absence diminishes commonplace passions, and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and kindles fire.

    - Fran c° ois, 6th Duc de La Rochefoucauld
      Maximes, no.276.

  •    The healthy life is hardly one marked by an absence of crises. In fact, an individual's psychological health is distinguished by how early he or she can meet crisis.

    - M(organ) Scott Peck
      The Different Drum.

  • Two evils, monstrous either one apart, Possessed me, and were long and loath at going: A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

    -John Crowe Ransom
      Chills and Fever,'Winter Remembered'.

  • Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

    - (Ahmed) Salman Rushdie
    Midnight's Children,'Alpha and Omega', bk.2.

  • We [the English] seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.

    - SirJohn Robert Seeley
      The Expansion of England.

  • Where God's presence is no longer a tenable proposition and where his absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.

    - George Steiner
      Real Presences.

  • Everything presses onwhilst thou art twisting that lock,see! It grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and everyabsence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make.

    - Laurence Sterne
    ^67  Tristram toJenny.Tristram Shandy, bk.9, ch.8.

  • These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.

    -William Wordsworth
      'Lines composed a few miles aboveTintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of theWye',1.22^8.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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