ABSENCE

How like a winter hath my absence been. From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere!
William Shakespeare

No more we meet in yonder bowers Absence has made me prone to roving; But older, firmer hearts than ours, Have found monotony in loving.
Lord Byron

The people who are absent are the ideal; those who are present seem to be quite commonplace.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars --all the beauties of creation.
Victor Hugo

Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.
Thomas p Kempis

Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long absence, as men are with themselves for a long affliction: absence does but hold off a friend, to make one see him the truer.
Alexander Pope

Absence -- that common cure of love.
Miguel De Cervantes

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.
Elizabeth Bowen

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.
Sir Matthew Hale

Failing to be there when a man wants her is a woman's greatest sin, except to be there when he doesn't want her.
Helen Rowland

When delicate and feeling souls are separated, there is not a feature in the sky, not a movement of the elements, not an aspiration of the breeze, but hints some cause for a lover's apprehension.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A short absence is the safest.
Ovid

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.
Ouida

Absence and death are the same -- only that in death there is no suffering.
Walter Savage Landor

Sometimes I need what only you can provide, your absence.
ª Ashleigh Brilliant

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Thomas Haynes Bayly

Absence and a friendly neighbor washes away love.
Proverbs

Achilles absent was Achilles still!
Homer