#absence

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

— Salman Rushdie

#life #matters #most #place #takes

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#become #find #hole #i #important

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. ↗

— George Saintsbury

#any #best #call #classical #comparative

The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. ↗

— George Saunders

#beloved #constant #culture #details #exaltation

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage. ↗

— Dan Savage

#children #compulsory #couples #defines #does

It would be hard to ignore the absence of democracy in any Arab nation. ↗

— Jack Schwartz

#any #arab #democracy #hard #ignore

Absence from those we love is self from self - a deadly banishment. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#banishment #deadly #love #love is #self

Rulers are not anointed. They are created by the void of self-mastery. ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#anointed #create #leadership #mastery #quotes

It's okay,” he said. “We're together.” He didn't say you're okay, or we're alive. After all they'd been through over the last year, he knew that the most important thing was that they were together. She loved him for saying that. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#annabeth-chase #heroes-of-olympus #inspirational #love #percy-jackson

In France, a woman may forget that she is neither young nor handsome; for the absence of these claims to attention does not expose her to be neglected by the male sex. ↗

— Marguerite Gardiner

#attention #claims #does #expose #forget