Absence Quotes - Page 24

• No mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.

  Gary Cooper

  Regret, Mistake, Mind

  "Fictional character: Professor Bertram Potts". "Ball of Fire", www.imdb.com. 1941.

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• I was a shy, awkward sort of a boy and my fathers frequent absences from home, along with my hero worship for him, made me even shyer.

  Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

  Father, Hero, Home

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• This poem is one of a series, all of them elegiac in intention, and subject to the strange forces of mourning that let loose illogical developments, into impossible configurations of thought. The poem is built of non-sequiturs, because that's what's left in the wake of the death. We cannot follow the dead, whether they are persons or ideas. Instead we remain, but in a situation that, in their absence, makes no sense.

  Lyn Hejinian

  Ideas, Mourning, Development

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• Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.

  Jackie Kay

  Strong, Loss, Looks

  Jackie Kay (2016). “Trumpet: Picador Classic”, p.18, Pan Macmillan

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• One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.

  Charles M. Blow

  Men, Empathy, Understanding

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• Great leadership isn’t shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos.

  Charles M. Blow

  Leader, Humanity, Together

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• I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated-the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else.

  Marwan Barghouti

  Guy, Helping, Self Help

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• That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving? People keep on loving even if you are not there in their face everyday to remind them? People keep on loving even if they no longer see you at all? People keep on loving even if they are loving someone else? Impossible: to believe you can be loved in absence when you don't even know how it feels to be loved when you are there.

  Camilla Gibb

  Believe, Ideas, People

  Camilla Gibb (2010). “Mouthing The Words”, p.235, Random House

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• Peace is not just the absence of violence,peace is when the flowers bloom.

  Amrita Pritam

  Flower, Violence, Blooming Flower

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• I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

  Wendell Berry

  Girl, Grief, Dark

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• But, today, the idea of faith returns to me. Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Teacher, Ideas, Grace

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.198, Vintage

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• There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Mean, Doe, Different

  Press Conference, www.nato.int. June 6, 2002.

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• The absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Evidence

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• I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas.

  Toni Morrison

  Ideas, Clothes, Junk

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• Persons are judged to be great because of the positive qualities they possess, not because of the absence of faults.

  John F. Kennedy

  Quality, Faults, Affirmation

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• Many unsustainable behaviours are locked-in and made 'normal', not just by the way that we produce and consume, but by the absence of easy alternatives

  Margaret Beckett

  Future, Vision, Way

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• I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

  Edith Wharton

  Beauty, America, Despair

  Edith Wharton, Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, Nancy Lewis (1988). “The letters of Edith Wharton”, Macmillan Reference USA

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• The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

  Simone Weil

  Evil, Boredom, Soul

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.226, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• But restraint is the only one sort of control, and absence of restraint isn't freedom. It's not control that's lacking when one feels 'free', but the objectionable control of force.

  B. F. Skinner

  Force, Restraint, Feels

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• Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.

  Sanford Meisner

  Silence, Theater, Silence Is

  Sanford Meisner, Dennis Longwell (2012). “Sanford Meisner on Acting”, p.29, Vintage

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• Intimate or drastic elements in the work of others are untouchable and should not be commented upon even in their absence. Private conflicts, quarrels, sentiments, animosities are unavoidable in any human group. It is our duty towards creation to keep these in check in so far as they might deform and wreck the work process.

  Jerzy Grotowski

  War, Groups, Elements

  Jerzy Grotowski (2012). “Towards a Poor Theatre”, p.259, Routledge

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• The absence of romance from my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

  Thucydides

  Winning, Past, Romance

  History of the Peloponnesian War bk. 1, ch. 1

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• Tact is one of the first of mental virtues, the absence of which is frequently fatal to the best of talents. Without denying that it is a talent of itself, it will suffice if we admit that it supplies the place of many talents.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Firsts, Talent, Virtue

  "Egeria: Or Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside".

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• If there is an ‘overabundance’ of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action - which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate - then action disfavoring that idea might ‘un-skew,’ rather than skew, public discourse.

  Elena Kagan

  Ideas, Might, Action

  "Kagan Argued for Government 'Redistribution of Speech'" by Matt Cover, www.cnsnews.com. May 11, 2010.

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• As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.

  John Paul Stevens

  Government, Expression, Ideas

  "Excerpts From Ruling on Internet: 'Statute Abridges the Freedom of Speech'". www.nytimes.com. June 27, 1997.

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