Quotes & Sayings About Absent Friends

I think my soul never was in such an agony before. I felt no restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to me. I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for multitudes of poor souls, and for many that I thought were the children of God, in many distant places. I was in such an agony, for half an hour before sunset, till near dark, that I was all over wet with sweat: but yet is seemed to me that I had wasted away the day, and had done nothing. Oh!, my dear Savior did sweat blood for poor souls! — David Brainerd

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We have really no absent friends. — Elizabeth Bowen

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. — Heloise D'Argenteuil

Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness. — Steve Martin

During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I have saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event ans it sort of levels out, so to speak - settles into the general landscape. — Anne Tyler

Letters, from absent friends, extinguish fear, Unite division, and draw distance near; Their magic force each silent wish conveys, And wafts embodied though, a thousand ways: Could souls to bodies write, death's pow'r were mean, For minds could then meet minds with heav'n between. — Aaron Hill

How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe. — Stephen King

Never speak ill of an absent friend. — Plautus

Friends, though absent, are still present. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due. — Neil Gaiman

How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time ... We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes, we hanker for old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the Day I loved you. — Ruskin Bond

And I'm up while the dawn is breaking, even though my heart is aching. I should be drinking a toast to absent friends instead of these comedians. — Elvis Costello

Absence is a curious thing. When friends are absent they seem to loom ever larger, till the lack of them is all one can feel. — Libba Bray

Sir, more than kisses,
letters mingle souls;
For, thus friends absent speak. — John Donne

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate
for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself. — Albert Camus

It is by the benefit of letters that absent friends are in a manner brought together. — Seneca The Younger

Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;
and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In different degrees, in every part of the town, men and women had been yearning for a reunion, not of the same kind for all, but for all alike ruled out. Most of them had longed intensely for an absent one, for the warmth of a body, for love, or merely a life that habit had endeared. Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship - letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these ... had desired a reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace. — Albert Camus

Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone. — Michael Crichton

Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. — Ambrose Bierce

We care. We feel. We think. We do not always miss the absent one. We cannot always come when called. Being friends with a loner requires patience and the wisdom that distance does not mean dislike. — Anneli Rufus

We didn't waste one second of that day. We talked about the past. We talked about the future. And we danced. And we sang. And we toasted absent friends, as the stars shone through the night sky, like Amber's last gift. — Matthew Crow

To be absent from the iPhone is to be present in the moment. Ignore it. Make some friends. — Phil Callaway

But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;-and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber which thou sittest. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them. — William Hazlitt

Let us drink together, fellows, as we did in days of yore.
And still enjoy the golden hours that Fortune has in store;
The absent friends remembered be, in all that's sung or said,
And Love immortal consecrate the memory of the dead. — Albert Pike

O friends, be men; so act that none may feel Ashamed to meet the eyes of other men. Think each one of this children and his wife, His home, his parents, living yet and dead. For them, the absent ones, I supplicate, And bid you rally here, and scorn to fly. — Homer

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent. — George Eliot

They are enthusiasts, devotees. Addicts. Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent. They seek each other out, these people of such specific like mind. They tell of how they found the circus, how those first few steps were like magic. Like stepping into a fairy tale under a curtain of stars ... When they depart, they shake hands and embrace like old friends, even if they have only just met, and as they go their separate ways they feel less alone than they had before. — Erin Morgenstern

When our friends are present we ought to treat them well; and when they are absent, to speak of them well. — Epictetus

I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends. — Vincent Van Gogh

Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was neverless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm. — Mervyn Peake

We have really no absent friends. — Elizabeth Bowen