Departures Quotes & Sayings

The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn't bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs; it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity. — Mitch Daniels

Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly. — Stephen King

And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place, with its turrets of mistly blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening onto the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day ... that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rocks and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place. — Angela Carter

As if hypnotized, he felt his gaze rise again to the old highway which swept by with winds that smelled a billion years ago. Great bursts of headlight arrived, then cut away in departures of red taillight, like schools of small bright fish darting in the wake of sharks and blind-traveling whales. The lights sank away and were lost in the black hills. Charlie — Ray Bradbury

Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath. — Simon Winder

This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority - or even a majority - will be forced to concede, often against its will. This makes collective policymaking contentious and favors a minimalist approach to social reform: better to do nothing than to divide people for and against a controversial project. — Tony Judt

Life can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it.
Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time.
We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures. — Simon Van Booy

My emotions were arrivals and departures, nonstop insignificances speeding through a station. — Matthew Aaron Goodman

He tried to escape he could not
Cut the binding cord of human love [ ... ]
Sweet venom
His arrivals were swift
And his departures sudden
I couldn't understand how
He lifted the shower door
Right off its hinges [ ... ]
Love you he coughed and kissed me
See you next week he was out
The door like a thousand other times [ ... ]
Most reckless of
reckless angels — Edward Hirsch

An airport is a potent place, a point of reunions and departures. For the traveler, it's a crossroads at the moment of decision, a flashpoint that separates intention from retreat. — Ginger Bensman

Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return. — Dejan Stojanovic

In this our life there are no beginnings but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed in the formal emotions thought to be appropriate and often forced. Darkly rises each moment from the life which has been lived and which does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself. — Delmore Schwartz

To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don't have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder. I wanted Margaret to go to college, but when she actually went away it broke my heart. Maybe if you had enough children you could get used to those departures, but, having only three, I never did. I felt them like amputations. Something I needed was missing. Sometimes, even now, when I come into this house and it sounds empty, before I think I will wonder, Where are they? — Wendell Berry

Every age has its dreams, its symbols of romance. Past generations were moved by the graceful power of the great windjammers, by the distant whistle of locomotives pounding through the night, by the caravans leaving on the Golden Road to Samarkand, by quinqueremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir ... Our grandchildren will likewise have their inspiration-among the equatorial stars. They will be able to look up at the night sky and watch the stately procession of the Ports of Earth-the strange new harbors where the ships of space make their planetfalls and their departures. — Arthur C. Clarke

Travellers understand, instinctively and by experience, that travel and adventure change and elongate time, even while navigating the deadlines of airline and train departures. — Paul Sheehan

As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character - filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone - until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing being to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you've traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can't come down again without falling, without being crushed. — Paul Auster

He believed in nothing. Which is why his departures and his pursuit of the most intense feelings and acts were so radical, so deep and honest. The truth of life was perfectly clear to him. Nothing was made, every new morning was clear. His only challenge was inward. He had not been disillusioned or had some bad experience that he could put it all down to. He had simply seen the world and that was that. And he understood how slippery every moment was and he liked the thrill of it. Slipping from the knowable to the unknown, walking from one street to the next, being different all the time. In one afternoon he could slip from one personality to another. Why not? — Dionne Brand

Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible - time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket. — Richard Ford

Jim's departures were always uncomfortable. — Patrick Lencioni

We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures. Magda — Simon Van Booy

I left this morning saying 'I love you'
as if setting out for some unknown country
instead of the corner shop. I wanted
you to be sure, in case
this time - out of, say, 10,000 departures
I never made it back: although
after 50 years together, 2 countries,
3 children, and several former journeys
that would put this one to shame
you'd think there'd be no need to pause
on my own doorstep, suddenly afraid
of the distance between us, of your absolute beauty,
of the growing aloneness when I clicked the latch. — Peter Bland

I mean, Chris is, I'm sure, a wonderful guy. But in those days he also very, very late. For all appointments and departures and arrivals and sound checks and anything. — Bill Bruford

Someone who loved night arrivals and dark departures, for the hell, the fun, the death of it? — Ray Bradbury

As an actor, you realize that your whole life is about arrivals and departures. You're always meeting people, you get really close, and then you all have to leave. — Jane Levy

Latitudes and Departures — Thomas Pynchon

I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably. — Heinrich Boll

Life is all arrivals and departures. — Karen Joy Fowler

DEPARTURE
The horizon slopes away
The days are longer
Trip
A heart hops in a cage
A bird sings
It is going to die
Another door is going to open
At the end of the corridor
Where a star
Begins to shine
A dark-haired woman
The lantern of the departing train
("Departure") — Pierre Reverdy

Sir, I'm afraid that the quality of this airline is partly measured by on-time departures. And unfortunately, on-time departures are measured by when we left the gate, not by wheels-up. — Marcus Buckingham

For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness. — Albert Camus

Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Oh, the continual drunken diversity of flights and departures!
Eternal soul of navigators and their navigations! — Fernando Pessoa

Departures and arrivals tend to emphasize people's personalities. — Lilli Palmer

Departure from the literal aspect, rather than mechanical exactness, is the code of the true artist. However, departures are the result of studied intent rather than inability. — Edgar Alwin Payne

Troublous times, departures from the faith, evil men waxing worse and worse, love waxing cold, are things distinctly predicted. — J.C. Ryle

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it. — Alexander Smith

I do wish men, when they're taking their leave from a lady at dawn, wouldn't insist on adjusting their clothes to a nicety, or fussily tying their lacquered cap securely into place. After all, who would laugh at a man or criticize him if they happened to catch sight of him on his way home from an assignation in fearful disarray, with his cloak or hunting costume all awry? — Sei Shonagon

What's so wonderful about experiments is that often they don't work. They do blow up in the oven; the Bride of Frankenstein does crawl out and strangle you with a black leotard while you shout your last prayers. It's only once you've tasted your own shocking failures, harebrained ideas, and sudden departures that you will realize something quite wonderful. — Susie Bright

Spring, the snow must go; fall, the leaves can't stay. — Marty Rubin

Departures should be sudden. — Benjamin Disraeli

Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blared. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. — Albert Camus

We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety
and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal. — Judith Viorst

Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race. — H.L. Mencken

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be another shift of civilization, like past departures of the era of kings, the time of slavery, the Agricultural Age, the epoch of colonialism, and the like. Such cultural transformations are partly invisible to contemporary people, but become obvious in retrospect. — James A. Haught

The more we become sensitive to our own journey the more we realize that we are leaving and coming back every day, every hour. Our minds wander away but eventually return; our hearts leave in search of affection and return sometimes broken; our bodies get carried away in their desires then sooner or later return. It's never one dramatic life moment but a constant series of departures and returns. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Some departures bring more light to your life! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I understood in a flash why, on the Greyhound sign, Arrivals and Departures were right next to each other. Because sometimes, like in that moment, they can mean exactly the same thing. — Morgan Matson

Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures. — Gretel Ehrlich

It is the prowess of scholars that meetings bring delight and departures leave memories. — Thiruvalluvar

Looking back I can see that there have been no breaks from one departure to the next; I start planning again before we've even arrived back home. — Barbara Hodgson

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory. — George Saunders