How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long or short, I did not know: I had never experienced the sensation. I had known what it was to come back to Gates head when a child after a long walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back from church to Lowood, to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either. Neither of these returning was very pleasant or desirable: no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thorn field was yet to be tried.

— Charlotte Brontë

I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort.

— Craig D. Lounsbrough

I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.

— Marcel Proust

I felt her absence. It was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. You wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone

— James Dashner

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend.

— Héloïse d'Argenteuil

If this turns to friendship, it only means That one of us will suffer. That when we meet after the worst of endings, There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leaving Behind a bluer sky each moment of departure. And one of us will cling on to its blue, Hung on partings like a muted cloud, while The other rides on a wing of word away from here.

— Cyril Wong

I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over.

— Alexandra Kleeman

I just wanted to tell you, how beautiful you were; that day, that night, that life.

— Anthony Liccione

I kiss her ghost, and sleep with the dust on her photograph, next to my bedside.

— Anthony Liccione

I know an alcoholic is the worst, but sometimes I wonder if it's better to have a drinking father that lives at home, or a drinking father, that never comes around.

— Anthony Liccione