So Long Goodbye Quotes & Sayings

Every meeting led to a parting, and so it would, as long as life was mortal. In every meeting there was some of the sorrow of parting, but in everything parting there was some of the joy of meeting as well. — Cassandra Clare

I turned back to the television. After a while what I was staring at registered. "Hey, this is The Long Goodbye."
Jake opened his eyes. "What?"
"This movie. It's Robert Altman's take on Chandler's The Long Goodbye. 'Nothing says good-bye like a bullet.'"
"I don't know," said Jake. "Sometimes the words are enough. — Josh Lanyon

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction. — Jean Dubuffet

Kate is going to die. It took me a long time to be able to say that. We all are going to die, when you get down to it, but it's not supposed to be like this. Kate ought to be the one saying goodbye to me. — Jodi Picoult

Zooey was in dreamy top form. The announcer had them off on the subject of housing developments, and the little Burke girl said she hated houses that all look alike-meaning a long row of identical 'development' houses. Zooey said they were 'nice.' He said it would be very nice to come home and be in the wrong house. To eat dinner with the wrong people by mistake, sleep in the wrong bed by mistake, and kiss everybody goodbye in the morning thinking they were your own family. He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you'd keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look 'very nice. — J.D. Salinger

Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, "goodbye" would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet.
"So long," she murmured from the far side of the trees. — Toni Morrison

As long as you loved somebody, each kiss was hope and wonder, but it was also the potential for good-bye. — Martina Boone

I told you that I love you, I was only telling a lie. I'll be long gone come the crack of dawn and I believe the word is goodbye. — James Taylor

Hello, old friend. And here we are. You and me, on the last page. By the time you read these words, Rory and I will be long gone. So know that we lived well and were very happy. And above all else, know that we will love you always. Sometimes I do worry about you though. I think once we're gone you won't be coming back here for awhile. And you might be alone. Which you should never be. Don't be alone, Doctor. And do one more thing for me. There's a little girl waiting in a garden. She's going to wait a long while, so she's going to need a lot of hope. Go to her. Tell her a story. Tell her that if she's patient, the days are coming that she'll never forget. Tell her she'll go to see and fight pirates. She'll fall in love with a man who'll wait two thousand years to keep her safe. Tell her she'll give hope to the greatest painter who ever lived. And save a whale in outer space. Tell her, this is the story of Amelia Pond. And this is how it ends. — Steven Moffat

When someone you love says goodbye you can stare long and hard at the door they closed and forget to see all the doors God has open in front of you. — Shannon L. Alder

And as all of us know, it does not matter if the ending has been predetermined, or the demise inevitable, or otherwise on time, or even long overdue. For those who love or even simply fondly know a life; for those who have touched one existence with their own, helping to mould it as it does the same to them, goodbye will always and forever come much, much, much too soon. — Emma Rose Kraus

I didn't have time to tell Bracken to care for her. I didn't have time to tell Arturo that I knew why he was hard on me, and it was okay. I didn't have time to tell Green that he was the sun and the moon and the stars. The Goddess gave me just enough time to feel her pain, to let her know I loved her. I had just long enough to say goodbye. — Amy Lane

There's a long goodbye,and it happens every day,when a passerbyinvites your eyeto come away.Even as you smile a quick helloyou let her go,you let the moment fly ... Too late you turn your head,you know you've saidthe Long Goodbye. — Johnny Mercer

Indeed. Oh, and Fal?"
"Yeah?"
"Get laid, while you're up there, won't you?"
"Oh, God."
"Seriously. Your hymen's going to grow back, it's been so long. Have a fling. It might lighten you up."
"Goodbye, Rache."

Meg Maguire, The Reluctant Nude — Meg Maguire

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

When friends speak overmuch of times gone by, often it's because they sense their present time is turning them from friends to strangers. Long before the moment came to say goodbye, I think, we said goodbye in other words and ways and silences. Then when the moment came for it at last, we didn't say it as should be said by friends. So now at last, dear Mouse, with many, many years between: goodbye. — Frederick Buechner

Look up," the darkness whispered,
"Do you wish to travel time?
For there are centuries of stories
Hidden inside each star's shine.
Yet what you see is just a sentence
In a tale with many more,
For the light reaching us now
Left the home countless years before.
And someday in the future
Long after your last goodbye,
Perhaps somebody else
Will turn their eyes upto the sky.
And where now you just see darkness
They will see a brand new light,
The beginning of a story
That has just left home tonight. — Emily Hanson

The only thing I'll never have is what I have lost for ever and ever ... As long as I live, until I draw my last breath, I shall remember Asel and all those beautiful things that were ours. The day I was to leave I went to the lake and stood on the rise above it. I was saying good-bye to the Tien Shan mountains, to Issyk-Kul. Good-bye, Issyk-Kul, my unfinished song! How I wish I could take you with me, your blue waters and your yellow shores, but I can't, just as I can't take the woman I love with me. Goodbye, Asel. Good-bye, my pretty poplar in a red kerchief! Good-bye, my love, I want you to be happy ... — Chingiz Aitmatov

Goodbye, Earth! So long, you piece of crap, except for Italy. — Paul Murray

The first thing she did after she found out she was sick was to send me to live with my older female cousin in the city. I was in middle school at the time. For my mother, sending me away was her way of loving me. She said I was too young to be tied down to a sick mother and that I had too much to live for. Everybody has to say goodbye eventually, she told me, so you may as well start practicing. I cannot say she was right. I think that if we all have to say goodbye eventually then the best we can do is try to stay together as long as we possibly can. But it's not that one of us was right and the other was wrong. We just saw things differently. — Kyung-Sook Shin

It's interesting, isn't it? ... the chandelier ... it reminds me of mushroom soup. — Tennessee Williams

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers ... She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on ... — Markus Zusak

The stores along Hollywood Boulevard were already beginning to fill up with overpriced Christmas junk, and the daily papers were beginning to scream about how terrible- it would be if you didn't get your Christmas shopping done early. — Raymond Chandler

I'll go [racing] until my body won't let me any more. Someone said to me: "The day you stop, you won't be able to get back on the same way as when you did as a pro." I want to delay that kiss goodbye as long as possible. — David Millar

Sweet hour, blessed hour, to carry me to you, and to bring you back to me, long enough to snatch one kiss, and whisper goodbye again. — Emily Dickinson

Quiet, moving, masterfully crafted. Such are the nine stories in Venus in the Afternoon. Tehila Lieberman writes with precision, restraint, with a compassionate heart. She inhabits her characters, young or old, men or women, honestly, but without judgment, until they rise off the page and stand before us breathing and alive. New York, the Atacama desert, Amsterdam or Cuzco in Peru, the settings in Venus in the Afternoon are just as varied as the lives which they contain. A wonderful collection, one that will stay in your mind long after you have bid it goodbye. — Miroslav Penkov

Not for a minute did I believe that this wasn't goodbye. Still, I had loved and been loved in return, and there was nothing greater than that. It far outweighed the alienation of all the previous years.
Bones thought five months was too short; I was amazed I'd been granted joy for so long.
"I love you," he moaned, or maybe I said it. I couldn't tell the difference anymore. The lines had
dissolved between us. — Jeaniene Frost

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore. — Meghan O'Rourke

Think of me, think of me fondly When we've said goodbye Remember me once in a while Please promise me, you'll try ... Recall those days, look back on all those times Think of those things we'll never do There will never be a day When I won't think of you ... Can it be? Can it be Christine ... Long ago, it seems so long ago How young and innocent we were She may not remember me But I remember her — Andrew Lloyd Webber

It was the best night in he had had in a long time, maybe ever. Finally, as he told her goodbye, he knew he had some things to take care of when he got back home. Chicago was home now. As long as she was there, it was his home. — Mia Castile

It seemed so good when it started.
I gave my trust to you.
I came to you open-hearted,
Hoping it was true.
Now I've gotten smart.
Now I've learned some things.
Now I know that what once was a start,
Is just an ending.
The longest good-bye
I ever knew,
The longest good-bye
Was the day
I said hello to you. — Heather Lynn Rigaud

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. — Constantine P. Cavafy

On the 11th of every month my friend elizabeth would say, "well we made it through another month. so do we get her back now?" we always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. its not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.
we expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. we figured that we'd said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. we'd passed the test and would get back what we'd lost. but instead, every anniversary hurt more, and every anniversary felt like she was further away from coming back. the idea that there wouldn't be a final goodbye- that was a hard goodbye in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. no private eye has to tell you it's a long goodbye.
... the loss just doesn't go away- it gets bigger the longer you look at it. — Rob Sheffield

'The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'. — Daniel Handler

Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue. — James Crumley

It feels right. But it's emotional. Saying goodbye to anything you've done that long is hard. — Angela Ruggiero

One kind kiss before we part,
Drop a tear and bid adieu;
Though we sever, my fond heart
Till we meet shall pant for you. — Robert Dodsley

All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it. — Joan Didion

Your mere goodbye and i got the long nights to cry
No,those are not stars you see in the sky..
I cried, Those are the diamonds of my eyes ... — Upasana Banerjee

If you see long term profit then say welcome otherwise Goodbye. — AbdulNasir

The woman who died night after night
and her dying was a long goodbye,
a train that never left. — Octavio Paz

In the distance, Amanda heard the sirens. Just a little bit longer. She didn't know what was wrong with her, but she was scared of dying before she had the chance to tell Ryker goodbye. In their capable hands, though, surely they could keep her alive long enough for him to return. They had to. — Rose Wynters

It's always difficult to say goodbye, especially when one has spent a long time - literally years, in the case of a series - inside a character or two, suffering and celebrating with them. — Lilith Saintcrow

Been a long road to follow
Been there and one tomorrow
Without saying goodbye to yesterday
Are the memories I hold
Still valid?
Or have the tears deluded them..
Something somewhere out there
Is calling ...
Zero Gravity,
What's it like?
Is somebody there
Beyond these heavy aching feet?
Am I going home?
Will I hear someone?
Singin solace to the silent moon
Still the road keeps on telling me
To go on ...
Something is pulling me,
I feel the gravity
Of it all. — Maaya Sakamoto

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

It took me a long time to learn the difference between working on a healthy relationship and wasting my time on a long goodbye. Never again! — Steve Maraboli

September was a thirty-days long goodbye to summer, to the season that left everybody both happy and weary of the warm, humid weather and the exhausting but thrilling adventures. It didn't feel like fresh air either, it made me suffocate. It was like the days would be dragging some kind of sickness, one that we knew wouldn't last, but made us uncomfortable anyway. The atmosphere felt dusty and stifling. — Lea Malot

Farewell My Friend

It was beautiful as long as it lasted
The journey of my life.
I have no regrets whatsoever
save the pain I'll leave behind.
Those dear hearts who love and care...
And the strings pulling at the heart and soul...
The strong arms that held me up
When my own strength let me down.
At every turning of my life
I came across good friends,
Friends who stood by me,
Even when the time raced me by.
Farewell, farewell my friends
I smile and bid you goodbye.
No, shed no tears for I need them not
All I need is your smile.
If you feel sad do think of me
for that's what I'll like
when you live in the hearts
of those you love, remember then
you never die. — Gitanjali Ghei

To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and wisdom in your heart, This is the best of life; when we are young We long to tread a way none trod before, But find the excellent old way through love And through the care of children to the hour Forbidding Fate and Time and Change goodbye. — William Butler Yeats

He gently pried my hand off his arm. "I have to," he said softly. He went to turn away, and then stopped, like maybe he was reconsidering. But instead of agreeing to come back to the Itineris with me, he reached out, cupped my face, and brought his lips to mine.
I was so shocked that I literally froze in place, one hand hovering in the air next to Cal's shoulder. The kiss was brief
just a little too long to be considered chaste
but when he pulled away, all I could do was stare at him, my mouth slightly agape. He ran his thumb over my lower lip, sending a tiny flurry of sparks through me. "Goodbye, Sophie. — Rachel Hawkins

The charged atmosphere made every little thing stand out as a performance, a movement distinct and vastly important. It was one of those hypersensitive moments when all your automatic movements, however long established, however habitual, become separate acts of will. You are like a man learning to walk after polio. You take nothing for granted, absolutely nothing at all. — Raymond Chandler

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

You left me for a dream you had to follow, but I thought goodbye wouldn't last that long. — Travis Tritt

Saying goodbye to something or someone after that long of a time, even if it brought you pain and misery, is hard. It's like living with a gangrene foot. You know you need to just whack it off and you'll be healthier for it. But damn if you don't feel some sort of emptiness when your decaying foot is gone. You look at the end of your leg expecting to see it there in all black and rotting but there's just nothing but air now. — Karina Halle

My solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail had many beginnings. There was the first, flip decision to do it, followed by the second, more serious decision to actually do it, and then the long third beginning, composed of weeks of shopping and packing and preparing to do it. There was the quitting my job as a waitress and finalizing my divorce and selling almost everything I owned and saying goodbye to my friends and visiting my mother's grave one last time. — Cheryl Strayed

Goodbye my almost lover, goodbye my hopeless dream, I'm tryin not to think about you, Can't you just let me be? So long, my luckless romance, my back is turned on you, should've known you'd bring me heartbreak, almost lovers always do — A Fine Frenzy

When there are lines upon my face from a lifetime of smiles,
When the time comes to embrace for one long last while,
We can laugh about how time really flies,
We won't say goodbye 'cause true love never dies,You'll always be beautiful in my eyes. — Joshua Kadison

I thought about a line from Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye that I always remembered - and it somehow seemed to fit both of us. "There is no trap so deadly as the one you set for yourself. — R. G. Belsky

Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible. — Walter Cronkite

It had been a long fifteen years. So much had changed in both their lives. Both hearts somehow sadly hardened. "Let us just make it through," Claire whispered her desperate plea. It was her only prayer, one she said over and over again. An almost cynical laugh erupted out of her as she turned one last time to say goodbye to her father's tombstone. That was her prayer? That was all she could come up with to say to God? Then so be it. — Laura Aranda

For a long time, she sat and saw.
She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of it, she saw the Fuhrer shouting his words and passing them around.
Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words. — Markus Zusak

Then it's goodbye, Sangsara for me
Besides, girls aren't as good as they look
And Samadhi is better than you think
When it starts in hitting your head
In with Buzz of glittergold
Heaven's Angels, wailing, saying
We've been waiting for you since morning, Jack
Why were you so long dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part (of Nothingness
I sing) Okay. Quit. Mad. Stop. — Jack Kerouac

And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils. — Franz Kafka

This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations. I've never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. Never boarded a crowded bus or subway car, sat in a seat reserved for the elderly, pulled out my gigantic penis and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face. But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks. — Paul Beatty

X
Today set sail like a cruising ship
taking us with it, so we waved goodbye
to the selves that we were yesterday
and left them ashore like a memory
while we launched out on the open sea,
were travelling! The breeze grew stiff
so we grabbed the railings,tasted the surf
as the sky came toward us, the equator noon
a place to pass us, while the tropics of tea
swung over us and straight on by
as time kept sailing and we hung on,
admiring the vistas of being away
while the shadows died down from the flames of day
and we coasted around a long headland of sky
and into night's port while, out in the bay
tomorrow called out like a ringing buoy. — Gwyneth Lewis

What was it like to lose him? Asked Sorrow.
There was a long pause before I responded:
It was like hearing every goodbye ever said to
me - said all at once. — Lang Leav

Out of the starless night that covers me,
(O tribulation of the wind that rolls!)
Black as the cloud of some tremendous spell,
The susurration of the sighing sea
Sounds like the sobbing whisper of two souls
That tremble in a passion of farewell.
To the desires that trebled life in me,
(O melancholy of the wind that rolls!)
The dreams that seemed the future to foretell,
The hopes that mounted herward like the sea,
To all the sweet things sent on happy souls,
I cannot choose but bid a mute farewell.
And to the girl who was so much to me
(O lamentation of this wind that rolls!)
Since I may not the life of her compel,
Out of the night, beside the sounding sea,
Full of the love that might have blent our souls,
A sad, a last, a long, supreme farewell. — William Ernest Henley

There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room. — Raymond Chandler

Whenever I say goodbye its never for long because I believe in the power of love. — Luther Vandross

To part is the lot of all mankind. The world is a scene of constant leave-taking, and the hands that grasp in cordial greeting today, are doomed ere long to unite for the the last time, when the quivering lips pronounce the word - 'Farewell — R.M. Ballantyne