Suddenly Gone Quotes & Sayings

I looked back to see if she was looking back to see me look back. She didn't. Suddenly a thick layer of mist covered her and I only saw a silhouette in black moving away from me. Slowly it turned into a shadow and then a dot. Strong wind blew the fog. She had gone from my life like the way she came. — Shahid Hussain Raja

He had suddenly the clearest understanding he had ever had of the way his father had gone so wrong. A man's strength was supposed to be against the outside world; to fight it back from himself and from those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given the strength to protect, because you couldn't deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness. — Laura Florand

If you became blind," I said, "if you were used to finding your way around a house and then, suddenly, one day had an accident
was attacked or something
and became blind, only then would you actually notice the furniture. It would always have been there, but you would never have been aware of it, you would just have gone around it. Only when something becomes hard to cope with do you see it. That's how you become aware of time
when it becomes hard to cope with. — Peter Hoeg

Poets talk about "spots of time," but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. — Norman Maclean

The years passed unnoticed and unremembered, and one autumn morning I found myself suddenly forty-five years old. It was a time for weighing youthful hopes against mature accomplishment, for it was quite certain that I had by then done all I was ever going to do. Sitting alone at my desk that evening of my forty-fifth birthday I asked that least original of introspective questions: Where had it all gone? And the somewhat less banal question: What, after all, had it been? My — Trevanian

Our twenties can be like living beyond time. When we graduate from school, we leave behind the only lives we have ever known, ones that have been neatly packaged in semester-sized chunks with goals nestled within. Suddenly, life opens up and the syllabi are gone. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cave-like existence. As one twentysomething astutely put it, The twentysomething years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There's this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff that needs to happen somehow. — Meg Jay

Calm now," I said with my lips to his ear and my hand to the side of his face. I knew he was thinking of Bad Axe, straining against a distant memory. In a lucid instant, he gripped my hand and searched my face. I felt him fighting to hold to this life, at great sufferance to himself.
I whispered, "Don't struggle for me, Henry, not if you are tired and wish to go."
I pressed my lips to his cheek, touched my finger to the corners of his eyes to brush away the moisture there.
"Husband?" I asked, searching his face, wondering why, suddenly, it had changed so.
All that night, I kept watch over him.
Even though he had gone, I did not want him to believe that such a small thing as the end of living could ever separate the two of us. — Micaela Gilchrist

He looked at the little maiden, and she looked at him; and he felt that he was melting away, but he still managed to keep himself erect, shouldering his gun bravely.
A door was suddenly opened, the draught caught the little dancer and she fluttered like a sylph, straight into the fire, to the soldier, blazed up and was gone!
By this time the soldier was reduced to a mere lump, and when the maid took away the ashes next morning she found him, in the shape of a small tin heart. All that was left of the dancer was her spangle, and that was burnt as black as a coal. — Hans Christian Andersen

The horses suddenly began to neigh, protesting
Against those who were drowning them in the ocean.
The horses sank to the bottom, neighing, neighing.
Until they had all gone down.
That is all. Nevertheless, I pity them,
Those bay horses, that never saw land again. — Boris Slutsky

Jackie looked from me to Denise and back, and I could swear I saw comprehension dawning in his eyes and he was about to say something, but to everyone's surprise, it was Jaymee who suddenly blurted out "Mommy! You're sleeping with him?"

"Jaymee!" Denise gasped, "What are you saying!? Where did you ever learn to ask such a thing!?"

"From Grandma, Mommy! She said when two grownups love each other very much, they go to bed together!"

How could I keep from bursting into laughter? Denise's composure was completely gone, Jaymee was blushing brightly at the realization that something she'd said had come out wrong without quite realizing what it was, and the look on Jackie's face from being beaten to the punchline was priceless. — B.R.L. Coryn

Kiernan told me-" Tears I hadn't even felt coming on suddenly began streaming down my cheeks. I had to swallow a sob before I could continue. "He told me he was sorry for-for loving me. He was s-sorry because," a deep breath helped me regain some of my waning control, "he didn't want to hut me. His biggest fear was the pain he'd cause those he cared about after he was gone. But I think we can all agree that knowing Kiernan for even a single day was worth a lifetime of grief — Jamie Canosa

So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things. I had been so busy creating a future of love that I never identified the life I was living as the life of love, because up until then I had never felt entitled enough or free enough or, honestly, brave enough to embrace my own narrative. Ironically, I had gone ahead and created the life I secretly must have wanted, but it had to be covert and off the record. Chemo was burning away the wrapper and suddenly I was in my version of life. Thus began the ecstasy - the joy, the pure joy of a spiritual pirate who finds the secret treasure. — Eve Ensler

Picking them up and reading them, I felt sadness do deep that it will never really be gone. It was a sobering moment
sobering not because I was drunk, but because I felt like I was shifting into this new state of naked clarity. It was higher state of sobriety, a painful state of sobriety, because the truth was suddenly unvarnished, making me feel unvarnished. — David Levithan

Suddenly pressing both hands on her heart, she fell to the ground, and the mist rose from her and melted in the air. I ran to her. But she began to writhe in such torture that I stood aghast. A moment more and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone. — George MacDonald

Suddenly I'm having one of those moments that you have after losing someone - when you feel as if you've been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down on the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can't cry anymore. — Jennifer Niven

Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got $260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it
lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding
sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money.
And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream.
Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that. — Jenny Downham

Joan and the Judge had gone to a Sunday brunch with friends. They would be home shortly, in good spirits probably, unless of course they saw their boy frozen to the mailbox.
So Claire and Maggie had no choice. They each grabbed a shoulder and hooked under an elbow and yanked suddenly without warning. Scotty brought his hands quickly to his mouth. All three stood quietly staring at the miniature pink circle of flesh still stuck on the mailbox.
"It looks like a little pizza," said Maggie without thinking. — Peter Hedges

It was the most terrible sound in a world of terrible sounds, the kind of sound that haunts you in the late hours of the night when the darkness shutters you in and the cold creeps into you through the cracks. When you are suddenly gripped by the unwavering certainty that you are already dead--and gone forever. — Traci Chee

It's strange, but when your father has gone you suddenly discover that the choices you have made were as much for him as for yourself. — Jo Nesbo

But there would be no confrontation the next day. And for Tommy Williams, there would be no school, either. Because the moment he walked through the gap in the stones to leave the circle, something quiet unexpected happened.
Tommy, holding tightly on to his rock, took the step that divided the inside of the circle from the outside - and disappeared.
The woods suddenly felt colder than usual. The darkness hung more heavily.
The amber was gone - and now nothing would ever be the same. — Liz Kessler

Blossom time, drunk together, banishing spring sorrow;
drunk, we broke off flowering limbs, counters for our rounds of wine.
Suddenly I remembered my old friend, gone to the edge of the sky:
by my reckoning, today he must have reached Liang-chou. — Bai Juyi

I prayed to dispel my fear, until suddenly, and I do not know how the idea came to me, I began to pray for others. I prayed for everyone who came into my thoughts - - people with whom I had traveled, those who had been in prison with me, my school friends of years ago. I do not know how long I continued my prayer, but this I do know - - my fear was gone! Interceding for others had released me! — Corrie Ten Boom

I think that's an obligation you have, to give back no matter what happens. It actually ends up being easier when you're young than when you become successful. Suddenly you realize you've gone into a whole other realm of philanthropy, from just being a volunteer to being this person that dedicates buildings and saves lots of children in some faraway place. — George Lucas

Next time I walk away," she whispered into his skin, "come with me." She let her gaze drift up to his throat, his jaw, his lips. "When this is all over, when Osaron is gone and we've saved the world again, and everyone else gets their happily ever after, come with me."
"Lila," he said, and there was so much sadness in his voice, she suddenly realized she didn't want to hear his answer, didn't want to think of all the ways their story could end, of the chance that none of them would make it out alive, intact. She didn't want to think beyond this boat, this moment, so she kissed him, deeply, and whatever he was going to say, it died on his lips as they met hers. — V.E Schwab

Seasons had come and gone; presidents in Kabul had been inaugurated and murdered; an empire had been defeated; old wars had ended and new ones had broken out. But Mariam had hardly noticed, hardly cared. She had passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.
But somehow, over these last months, Laila and Aziza - a harami like herself, as it turned out - had become extensions of her, and now, without them, the life Mariam had tolerated for so long suddenly seemed intolerable.
We're leaving this spring, Aziza and I. Come with us, Mariam. — Khaled Hosseini

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass! — Wendy McClure

Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone. — Hodding Carter

True? Yes, I suppose-unfit somehow-anyway ... So I came here. There was nowhere else I could go. I was played out. You know what played out is? My youth was suddenly gone up the water-sprout, and-I met you. You said you needed somebody. Well, I needed some-body, too. I thanked God for you, because you seemed to be gentle-a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in! But I guess I was asking, hoping-too much! Kiefaber, Stanley and Shaw have tied an old tin can to the tail of the kite. — Tennessee Williams

The thing about having one really good friend, one person you talk to all the time about everything, is that you stop really talking to anyone else. You sort of talk to other people, but mostly you have your one person and that's enough.

And then one day, maybe for a good reason or maybe out of nowhere, you can't talk to that friend anymore, and you suddenly realize you can't talk to anyone else. Like, it's physically impossible. No one understands you except that person. it's like you speak another language, and the other person who also speaks it is gone. — Amanda Maciel

The light from the moon shone along the door casing and spread across the walls a few inches inside, far enough for her to suddenly notice that the phases-of-the-moon wallpaper she'd been living with all week was gone. It was a now curious dark color she couldn't quite make out, punctuated by long strips of yellow. It looked almost like dark doors and windows opening, letting in light. The wallpaper was usually some reflection of her mood or situation, but what did this mean? Some new door was opening? Something was being set free? — Sarah Addison Allen

Suddenly, someone who was at the center of your life is gone, excised as quickly as an apple is cored, a sharp spike driven down the center of your world, then a cruel flick of the wrist and the almost surgical extraction of your very heart. — Lisa Scottoline

Their voices came in clearly from the golf course. The laughing and yelping made a raucous counterpoint to the metronomic tock-tock-tock of the bunny's never-ending hop. Once, in the light of the quarter moon, they appeared in silhouette on a domed, distant green, like figures dancing in someone's dream.
And then quite suddenly they were gone, as if the dreamer had awakened. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. Someone called "Hey!" after them, but that was all. — Jerry Spinelli

I'd read an enormous amount but had spent so much time in my own head that I didn't have extensive social skills. Suddenly I was in this world where I was surrounded by these incredibly polished and wealthy kids who had gone to prep schools, and I felt daunted by them. I don't think people were aware of how full of anxiety I was ... For a long time I felt like I was living in a place where I shouldn't have been. — Dan Chaon

Everything had changed suddenly
the tone, the moral climate; you didn't know what to think, whom to listen to. As if all your life you had been led by the hand like a small child and suddenly you were on your own, you had to learn to walk by yourself. There was no one around, neither family nor people whose judgment you respected. At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute
life or truth or beauty
of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good. — Boris Pasternak

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.
And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture, - a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope ...
Penelope, who really cried. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn't get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution. — Claude Levi-Strauss

One year, on Yom Kippur eve, Salanter did not show up in synagogue for services. The congregation was extremely worried; they could only imagine that their rabbi had suddenly taken sick or been in an accident. In any case, they would not start the service without him. During the wait, a young woman in the congregation became agitated. She had left her infant child at home asleep in its crib; she was certain she would only be away a short while. Now, because of the delay, she slipped out to make sure that the infant was all right. When she reached her house, she found her child being rocked in the arms of Rabbi Salanter. He had heard the baby crying while walking to the synagogue and, realizing that the mother must have gone off to services, had gone into the house to calm him. — Joseph Telushkin

He'd just poured himself a hot cup of coffee, his mouth already watering as he brought the mug to his
lips.
"Oh, thanks, sweetie." And like that, the cup was gone.
He glared down at the female who dared take his coffee. The life-giving elixir was his! Then he noticed
she was fully dressed.
"You're leaving?" Damn. And he really did have plans for that adorable little ass.
"Oh, yeah." She sipped the coffee and grimaced. "Geez. Battery acid." It suddenly occurred to
him ... She was perky. Who was perky at five-thirty in the morning?
Good Lord!Morning people were perky at five-thirty in the morning! — Shelly Laurenston

You know when you think you know someone? More than anyone in the world? You know you know them, because you've seen them, like, for real. And then you reach out, and suddenly they are just ... gone. You though you belonged together. You thought they were yours, but they're not. You want to protect them, but you can't. — Ava Dellaira

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through. — Chris Lowe

Runaways are romantic. The girls are waiflike with dyed ratty hair and baggy pants. They usually own a stray dog of the mutt variety and drag it along by a rope, plopping down in front of storefronts to beg for money from passersby. They're a mess. It is likely they'll charm you, make you think you're their best friend and savior only to end up using you and then they'll disappear. That's why they're romantic. They're there and then they're gone. Romance is always about people appearing in a flash out of nothing or people who are there and then suddenly are not. A magic trick. — Bett Williams

Moron?" I asked, trying to lighten the suddenly tense mood. She covered her eyes with one hand. "It was the best I could come up with on the spot. Now that he's gone, I have so many bitchier things to say." Her chin trembled, and I was the one that felt like a moron. "I'm sorry," I whispered. — Rachel Higginson

With this pregnancy, unlike my others, I was fully aware of the possibility of blissful, painless, potentially even orgasmic, and fully natural, unmedicalized childbirth from the beginning. After reaching my second trimester, I was relaxing in the bath after my children had gone to sleep, when suddenly I felt a profound connection with the little girl within me. She communicated to me how this birth was going to go. How it was going to feel. In essence, I knew she would pass easily out of my body. — Adrienne Carmack

Do not throw that at me!" Kane's voice suddenly shouted.

Keela cackled. "It's just a tub of butter, you big baby."

"It's a frozen tub of butter, so you might as well throw a brick at my head!"

"That can be arranged, big man."

"You're an evil little person, I hope you know that."

"I do."

I laughed at their conversation and sunk back into my sofa, tugging my blanket farther up my body.

"Leave him alone, Keela."

I heard something being set down on either the kitchen counter or table. It dropped with a thud. "You're lucky she wants you alive and unharmed."

"And you're lucky she wants you here often, otherwise I'd ban you from ever entering this building."

Keela seethed. "You've gone mad with power."

I smiled. — L.A. Casey

Four wanders through the crowd of initiates, watching us as we go through the movements again. When he stops in front of me, my insides twist like someone is stirring them with a fork. He stares at me, his eyes following my body from my head to my feet, not lingering anywhere - a practical, scientific gaze.
"You don't have much muscle", he says, "which means you're better off using your knees and elbows. You can put more power behind them."
Suddenly he presses a hand to my stomach. His fingers are so long that, though the heel of his hand touches one side of my rib cage, his fingertips still touch the other side. My heart pounds so hard my chest hurts, and I stare at him, wide-eyed.
"Never forget to keep tension here", he says in a quiet voice.
Four lifts his hand and keeps walking. I feel the pressure of his palm even after he's gone. It's strange, but I have to stop and breathe for a few seconds before I can keep practicing again. — Veronica Roth

When you love a flower", he said, as if wishing to explain his altered experience, "and suddenly she is gone, everything vanishes with her. I lived because she lived. Now she is gone. Without her, I am nothing. — Vaddey Ratner

Suddenly he was in the doorway, looming over her in a determined fashion. Gone was sweet, patient Griffin. This was the Duke of Greythorne, one of the most powerful men in England.
"I don't care that you came to Dandy," he said, his voice low, but sharp. "If you want to blame yourself for Sam's injury, then go ahead and be a fool. And I don't care that you could cosh my head in if you wanted. I came here to get you and if I have to, I'll toss you over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry you all the way to Mayfair. I'm taking you home where you belong. — Kady Cross

Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless. — Haruki Murakami

I hadn't seen him in quite a while and he'd grown at least four inches in the months between our visits. With his perfect teeth and constant huge smile I found myself looking at him in a whole new way. Gone was the skinny kid whose birthday was the day before my own and loved saying we were the same age for that twenty four hour period before I officially turned a year older than him. He wasn't that twelve year old who'd yanked on my hair and put baby oil in the sunblock so I got a nasty burn when we visited a theme park together. Suddenly I saw Jim wasn't a little kid anymore. He was a guy - a hot guy at that. A hot guy who spent the entire day glued to my side. — Melissa Simmons

Suddenly, despite all the fun she'd had, Azzah felt down. Watching the champagne bubbles sparkle and fizz in her glass, she realized by tomorrow all the bubbles would be gone, and she'd have to go back to her flat, dull, fizz-less life. — Christian F. Burton

If anyone ever wonders why there's nothing coming from me, it's not my fault. I'm doing the work. No, I haven't deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can't get anything into print. And apparently I'm not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. In my own case, the more disturbing element is the editor-in-chief who said to me, "I think this book is terrific. It ought to be in print. I can't publish it
I've been told I mustn't." The indication is that I'm not writing what people want to read, but I never did. — Tanith Lee

And the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time — Frank O'Hara

In every big-budget science fiction movie there's the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it's gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn't have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn't going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput ...
VROOOOSH.
But it was exactly like that anyway. — Neil Gaiman

Suddenly, she doesn't want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it's equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn't she die? She lives because she's meant to live, because she's already alive and it's comparatively easy to stay that way. She lives because, even though she doesn't know what it is, there must be a reason why she's here in the first place. She lives because either she's not as brave as all the dead girls who've gone before her, or she's actually braver - it's hard to tell. — A.M. Homes

I have fallen in love with you, and there is no future for us. That you burst into my life suddenly only a short time ago. That it's too fast, too soon, and you will leave the same way you came into my life. I'll turn around one day and you'll be gone. — Rachel Gibson

Suddenly he goes into the last phase - the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has "crashed and bled out." Or more politely they say that the victim has "gone down. — Richard Preston

World was in the face of the beloved
,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world can not be grasped.
Why didn't I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I couldn't almost taste it?
Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We walk up the sandy slope toward the dining terrace. I see Troy sitting at a table with some people I know. I look at Scottie to see if she sees him, and she is giving him the middle finger. The dining terrace gasps, but I realize it's because of the sunset and the green flash. We missed it. The flash flashed. The sun is gone, and the sky is pink. I reach to grab the offending hand, but instead, I correct her gesture.
"Here, Scottie. Don't let that finger stand by itself like that. Bring up the other fingers just a little bit. There you go. That's the cool way to do it."
Troy stares at us and smiles a bit. He's completely confused.
"All right, that's enough." I suddenly feel sorry for Troy. He must feel awful. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor,' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it, you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like, 'God, five years have gone by.' — Bill Condon

I sometimes feel that I am trying to dig in the world around me. I'm involved in another kind of archaeology to look for another kind of truth, and the moment I find, the moment I am separated from that life, the moment I am sort of in a world, every time I have gone out and performed in the, in the cinema for example, if you do two or three films on the trot you suddenly have this impression that you're becoming separate or separated from the world around you. — Simon McBurney

It's the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion
the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe that we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea he laughed
and he cut himself. Laughter is an orgasm of the mind. — Gloria Steinem

Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light - that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained. — James Salter

Time has become quiet flexible inside the library. (This is true of most places with interesting books. Sit down to read for twenty minutes, and suddenly it's dark, with no clue as to where the hours have gone.) — Ellen Klages

Being sucked into a black hole would pretty much be the coolest way to die. It's not like anyone has firsthand experience, and scientists can't decide if you would spend week floating past the event horizon before being torn apart or soar into a kind of maelstrom of particles and be burned alive. I like to think of what it would be like if we were swallowed, just like that. Suddenly none of this would matter. No more worrying about where we're going or what's to become of us or if we'll ever disappoint another person again. All of it-just ... gone. — Jennifer Niven

Love is like the human appendix. You take it for granted while it's there, but when it's suddenly gone you're forced to endure horrible pain that can only be alleviated through drugs. — Reverend Jen

B4 U,my life ws lyk a moonless night.Very dark, but der wer stars,points of light & reason.And den you shot
across my sky like a meteor.Suddenly everythng ws on fire;ter ws
brilliancy,der ws beauty.Wen u wer gone,wen d meteor had
fallen over d horizon,everythng went black.Nothing had changed,but
my eyes wer blinded by d light I cudn't c d stars anymore & ter was no more reason, for anything. — Stephanie Mayer

There are so many things to grieve ... All the dogs & cats & birds & snakes we have loved & lost, & old lovers, but what else? ... it took me forever to see that one of them was my own daughter, my baby, a young woman I thought of only as a girl, a child, & there she was, suddenly a woman, & I felt this ache gnaw at me as if I hadn't eaten in a year ... I stood there watching my daughter gesture & move & laugh with the grace of a grown-up, & I just started crying like a baby. It wasn't unlike the same type of sorrow we all feel when we realize something we once had that was very precious is not longer there. That it is forever lost, changed, deceased. Like a baby, gone, except in your memory ... My own daughter is now a woman. I get it. Another passage, another form of loss, another reason to grieve, another part of this life process. — Kris Radish

Haldir had gone on and was now climbing to the high flet. As Frodo prepared to follow him, he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself. — J.R.R. Tolkien

He would never be any different and now Scarlett realize the truth and accepted it without emotion - that until he died Gerald would always be waiting for Ellen, always listening for her. Her was in some dim borderline country where time was standing still and Ellen was always in the next room. The mainspring of his existence was taken away when she died and with it has gone his bounding assurance, his impudence and his restless vitality. Ellen was the audience before which the blustering drama of Gerald O'Hara had been played Now the curtain had been rung down forever, the footlights dimmed and the audience suddenly vanished, while the stunned old actor remained on his empty stage, waiting for his cues. — Margaret Mitchell

Just do me a favor first - go find the baby. Find out who has her. If I go out there now everybody's going to want to start talking and it'll be midnight before I find her. Take a quick walk around, would you do that? Make sure some drunk didn't leave her in a chair." "How will I know it's your baby?" Cousins asked. Now that he thought about it, he hadn't seen a baby at the party, and surely with all these Micks there were bound to be plenty of them. "She's the new one," Fix said, his voice gone suddenly sharp, like Cousins was an idiot, like this was the reason some guys had to be lawyers rather than cops. "She's the one in the fancy dress. It's her party. — Ann Patchett

he was surgically removing a malignant tumor that I'd been carrying around for years. A tumor that had been eating away at my insides. A tumor that, with his words, suddenly was gone. You — Kristen Ashley

At least you didn't need to change your breeches."
He glanced up again instantly, pinning her eyes with his, his own suddenly gone lambent. "Now why didn't I think of that? Would it inspire you to ravish me? — Johanna Lindsey

And suddenly it seemed to Olive that every house she had ever gone into depressed her, except for her own, and the one they had built for Christopher. It was as though she had never outgrown that feeling she must have had as a child - that hypersensitivity to the foreign smell of someone else's home, the fear that coated the unfamiliar way a bathroom door closed, the creak in a staircase worn by footsteps not one's own. — Elizabeth Strout

Prison left me with some strange little tics.' She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It's not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it's just that she starts to sweat and go cold. 'This apartment is perfect for me,' she says, looking around the open space.
'How about elevators?' I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs.
'Exactly,' she replies, 'I don't like them much either.'
One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say 'That's outrageous', or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs-it was an automatic flight reaction. — Anna Funder

And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you've found the pot of gold, when you'd thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It's enough, for a time - maybe even for a long time - to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all. — Claire Messud

Sometimes you wish to escape to another part of the book.
You stop reading and riffle the pages, catching sight of the story as it races ahead, not above the world but through it, through forests and complications, the chaos of intentions and cities.
As you near the last few pages you are hurtling through the book at increasing speed, until all is a blur of restlessness, and then suddenly your thumb loses its grip and you sail out of the story and back into yourself. The book is once again a fragile vessel of cloth and paper. You have gone everywhere and nowhere. — Thomas Wharton

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out. — Robert Redford

He's on a bus to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job."

She brightened up very suddenly. "Oh- to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married."

"I guess he forgot," I said, "or he would have gone somewhere else. — Raymond Chandler

Suddenly she felt strong and happy. She was not afraid of the darkness or the fog and she knew with a singing in her heart that she would never fear them again. No matter what mists might curl around her in the future, she knew her refuge. She started briskly up the street toward home and the blocks seemed very long. Far, far too long. She caught up her skirts to her knees and began to run lightly. But this time she was not running from fear. She was running because Rhett's arms were at the end of the street. — Margaret Mitchell

When I started working on 'Michael And Michael,' it was my life for three to four months, and then suddenly it's gone. — Kumail Nanjiani

I'm taking a shower."
Oh, God. She was killing him. Making him want to laugh out loud. Where had his sense of self-preservation gone? He didn't feel emotion - that was far too dangerous. He shivered beneath the blankets, suddenly afraid for her. For himself.
"You're still cold. I should have thought to rub you down with some warm oil. Lexi makes it and I use it sometimes when I come in from a dive. It warms you up fast. Can you roll over, because I'm not rubbing your front."
"Why not?"
"If you want a massage, turn over. — Christine Feehan

Mary-Lynnette felt a violent wrench in her chest. For a moment everything seemed suspended-and changed.
If Ash were dead-if Ash had been killed ...
Things would never be all right. She would never be all right. It would be like the night with the moon and stars gone. Nothing that anybody could do would make up for it. Mary-Lynnette didn't know why-it didn't make any sense-but she suddenly knew it was true. — L.J.Smith

The religious climate of Jesus's day was evidence of what happens when no one stops the counterfeit. The Spirit of God had gone silent after Malachi, but that did not stop the spiritual authorities from trying to keep the whole mechanism turning under the power of their own self-righteousness. Can you imagine what it might be like to have been faking spiritual power for hundreds of years when suddenly the real thing shows up? — Jared C. Wilson

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible ... — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey. — Thomas Merton

I once heard a woman who'd lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy. — Caroline Knapp

I was conscious of that moment of stepping into the woods and leaving everything else behind. That one instant when all the sounds of people, of traffic, of doors opening and closing, were suddenly gone, swallowed up by trees and ferns. It was like a curtain falling on a stage, and I waited for that moment every time. My heart opened just a little bit wider. — Lynn Thomson

Resurrection of the flesh. Out of nothingness, out of the void, out of white plaster, out of a dense fog, out of a snowy field, out of a sheet of paper there suddenly will appear people, living bodies, they rise up to remain forever, because they can't vanish, disappearing is simply not an option; death has already come and gone. First the contour, outlines, edges. Period, period, comma makes a crooked little face. Cross-out. The man stretches from this crack in the wall to that spot of sun. Stretches from nail to nail. — Mikhail Shishkin

I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It's the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. — Gloria Steinem

Once the bomb release was yanked, it was finished. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies. — Ray Bradbury

For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops."
"The clock stops, you mean."
"No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire's gone out, and the sun's gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-" now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. "Or an opened lock. — Neal Stephenson

then suddenly one day he awake to find that time had gone; the house completed, the imortelle tree cut down, his mother dead. — Earl Lovelace

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And the browns gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.


I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain. — Jack Gilbert

It's always in those moments when you've shunned God, or you've gone ahead as if you don't need Him, that you find yourself crawling back with pathetic little attempts to get His attention because suddenly you're weak and you need to convince yourself you're not alone on the bathroom floor. — Hannah Brencher

Today she feels she is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt. The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant. Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark. — Glenn Haybittle

He runs his hand over his face, and suddenly the cocky joker is gone, and I can see all of his shadows. — Tarryn Fisher

She stood motionless on the shore, waiting for the dream to continue, for a solution to become visible, but nothing happened. Then she awoke and thought maybe that was how Pierre had died. Like a bird that takes off and ascends and is suddenly gone.

Free, she thought, released. Then she thought:alone.

She stared at the ceiling. No beauty whatsoever, no freedom; she remembered that Pierre was dead and felt ordinary despair and grief pour in through the dawn. The dream dispersed. Suddenly she was unsure.

Maybe the dream wasn't about Pierre but about herself. — Per Olov Enquist

He was stricken anew by her, overcome with the knowledge that in the morning he would have to relinquish her. In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you'd once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself
Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs
you let go of all the others, each person you'd once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone. — Adam Johnson

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

I had gone far in search of the sun, and the sun, found at last, was hostile to me. And if I were to fling myself off a cliff? While I was making such rather grim speculations, considering these pines, these rocks, these waves, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe. — Emil M. Cioran