Quote by Diane Johnson

“Life sometimes takes us down a path where our desires are attained, and some passions are left untouched, hidden but not forgotten.”

— Penelope Dianne Williams

“Quite often, too, a writer who has for a time been believed to possess a great store of ordinarily profound ideas, and who is…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“[...] but just as formerly these pursuits and ideas had seemed petty and insignificant in comparison with the darkness that overshadowed all existence, so…

— Leo Tolstoy

“Nor am I nostalgic, as a French philosopher once wrote, for a lost poverty. I am nostalgic for the solidarity and sharing a modest…

— Anonymous

“Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all…

— Roland Barthes

“He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes…

— Colm Tóibín

“And we who loved the world must learn the language of absence: days foreshortened, empty rooms, the irrevocable distance between the goodbye and the…

— Joe Bolton

“The world we have created does not encourage or promote leave-of-absences. It does not promote deep contemplation, especially the type with no time-frame.”

— Jane Meredith

“At the beginning, the author's writing was like a selfie: a disposable plea for attention that was all about him and his life. But…

— Steven Pressfield

“My life is diminished for the absence of great things. Yet they are in reality not absent at all. Rather I am too absent-minded…

— Craig D. Lounsbrough

“To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of the inalterable and yet…

— Michel Foucault

“He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that…

— Thomas Mann