Best Farewells Quotes & Sayings

I had suddenly become aware of my hands, which meant only one thing: It was time to say my farewells and make a graceful
or at least dignified
exit.
Dogger had once told me, 'Your hands know when it's time to go.'
And he had been right. The hands are the canaries in one's own personal coal mine: They need to be watched carefully and obeyed. A fidget demands attention, and a full-blown not-knowing-what-to-do-with-them means 'Vamoose! — Alan Bradley

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral. — Jorge Luis Borges

All farewells should be sudden, when forever. — Lord Byron

In the arctic, seasons do not melt peaceably into one another as they do in other climes, giving each other handshakes, fond farewells, and see-ya-next-years. In the arctic, winter stands like a barbarian horde on the edge of town one day and ravages it the next. Winter moves in without warning, grabs summer by the belt loops of its cutoffs, and throws it out the door. — Ken Ilgunas

Windows were broken. Where not broken they were boarded up, had been for years: the rust from nailheads had written long, sad farewells down the salt-silvered planks. — Joseph Hansen

Rankin put down his glass and stared at him coldly. "I beg your pardon?" he said. "I gather this is some more of your officious - "
Laurence paid no attention, but seized the back of his chair and heaved. Rankin fell forward, scrabbling to catch himself on the floor. Laurence took him by the scruff of his coat and dragged him up to his feet, ignoring his gasp of pain.
"Laurence, what in God's name - " Lenton said in astonishment, rising to his feet.
"Levitas is dying; Captain Rankin wishes to make his farewells," Laurence said, looking Lenton squarely in the eye and holding Rankin up by the collar and the arm. "He begs to be excused."
The other captains stared, half out of their chairs. Lenton looked at Rankin, then very deliberately sat back down. "Very good," he said, and reached for the bottle; the other captains slowly sank back down as well. — Naomi Novik

AhthOOn SSyng!" I said. "That's farewell."
"It sounds evil."
"It is," I answered, and we parted. — Gail Carson Levine

Even though Paul knew farewells were inevitable, he still formed deep relationships. — Beth Moore

Save your kisses for the world, little one.
- Magnus to Lestat before going into the fire. — Anne Rice

Goodbye," she said.
When I didn't say it back, she rested her hand on the top of my head. The weight was strange and gentle. "I love you," she said. "And when I tell you goodbye, I don't mean forever or for long. Just that I'm going home now, and so are you. — Brenna Yovanoff

Farewells always come suddenly. Each meeting might be called once-in-a-lifetime. You never know when you'll part, or if you'll ever meet again. All that you can do is spend every second so that there'll be no regrets. If you do that, the time that you've spent together ... will be the greatest gift of all. — Minari Endou

It was a perfect night for a train. The occasional whistle told Louis of all the farewells he had ever known. — Charles Tennyson Turner

I have had my fill of words and tearful farewells, — Gannicus

If we knew when we woke up that it would be the last day of our lives, we would transform every little act of our daily humdrum into small farewells. — Alexandre A. Loch

How the thought of meeting lost loved ones would sweeten one's last moments, how eagerly would one embrace them, and what bliss to live together once more in immortality! He suffered agonies when he considered religion's charitable lie, which compassionately conceals the terrible truth from feeble creatures. No, everything finished at death, nothing that we had loved was ever reborn, our farewells were for ever. For ever! For ever! That was the dreadful thought that carried his mind hurtling down abysses of emptiness. — Emile Zola

Life was a series of greetings and farewells, one was always saying good-bye to something, to someone. — Daphne Du Maurier

Perhaps farewells create new territories, or they send us back to the only territory that truly belongs to us, that of solitude. — Andres Neuman

This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the next-and I didn't want to forget a single one. — Banana Yoshimoto

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn't fashionable these days, but it's her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. — Margaret Drabble

One line on the arm, one line on the heart. The bastards who stood by my side with two lines. They'll be the hardest farewells I'll have to make in my life and they're the luckiest fortune I've met in my lifetime. — Choi Yoon-young

Muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about the boat, our fellow-passengers and our prospects, and then I said: "I think you mentioned last night a name I know - that of Mr. Porterfield." "Oh no I didn't! — Henry James

He felt the decision like a seed crystal giving form to the chaos around it, solid, hard, resolute. Desperation, mourning, and a million farewells, one to the other. The word quarantine came to him, and with the logic of dreams, it carried an unsupportable weight of horror. But within it, like the last voice in Pandora's box, the promise of reunion. One day, when the solution was found, everything that had been lost would be regained. The gates reopened. The vast mind restored. — James S.A. Corey

Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the "Giulia" blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Build traditions in your families that will bring you together, for they can demonstrate your devotion, love, and support for one another. These events would include blessings of children, baptisms, other priesthood ordinances, graduations, missionary farewells, homecomings, and, of course, marriages. Sharing these occasions as a family will help us build a foundation established upon a rock. — L. Tom Perry

Now that you've said hello, I'm afraid we move right into farewells. Hello, goodbye. Like flowers scattered in a storm, man's life is one long farewell, as they say, — Haruki Murakami

Give warm greetings and farewells. I was surprised by how much this resolution changed the atmosphere of my home. — Gretchen Rubin

But I'd long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren't guaranteed or promised.
You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a good-bye at all. — Sarah Dessen

Wolves hate farewells,... — David Clement-Davies

A 'hello again' after the final goodbye is sometimes harder than just keeping the goodbye as it was. — Jessiqua Wittman