That’s the worst way to miss somebody. When they’re right beside you and you miss them anyway.
—Pittacus Lore in I Am Number Four
Never find fault with the absent.
—Alexander Pope
Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
—Emily Dickinson
Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.
—Thomas Fuller
The absence of the dead… is their way of appearing.
—Simone Weil
In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's.
—Gayle Forman in Where She Went
Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.
—Gayle Forman in Just One Day
Absence—that common cure of love.
—Lord Byron
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.
—Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk
What was it about life now? The people who weren't present always seemed to be more important than the people who were.
—Elin Hilderbrand in Beautiful Day
You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible.
—Casey McQuiston in White & Royal Blue
I dote on his very absence.
—William Shakespeare