#absence

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend. ↗

— Héloïse d'Argenteuil

#company #consolation #friends #friendship #images

I mean she's Cleopatra... shouldn't she and Antony have known better? They were so different..." "Variety is the spice of life" "And from a thousand miles apart" "Absence makes the heart grow fonder ↗

— Ally Carter

#life #love #variety #life

Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions. ↗

— Criss Jami

#closer #compensation #filling-the-void #god #horrific

You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#great-house #loneliness #nicole-krauss #movies

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

#body #business #come #company #confined

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! ↗

— Edsger Dijkstra

#bugs #never #presence #program #show

That a great battle must soon be fought no one could doubt; but, in the apparent and perhaps real absence of plan on the part of Lee, it was impossible to foretell the precise scene of the encounter. ↗

— Edward Everett

#apparent #battle #could #doubt #encounter

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#affirmative #almost #black #colour #colours

Absence - that common cure of love. ↗

— Lord Byron

#absence #common #cure

I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#could #death #i #me #said