#absence

You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#great-house #loneliness #nicole-krauss #movies

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present. ↗

— Antonin Artaud

#feel #from time to time #makes #me #must

The surest test of discipline is its absence. ↗

— Clara Barton

#discipline #surest #test

The war on terror, if this is a war on terror, can only be won by a sincere regional and international cooperation. All have to believe they have something at stake and work together. In the absence of this it will become political and interest-oriented. ↗

— Hamid Karzai

#become #believe #cooperation #international #international cooperation

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#affirmative #almost #black #colour #colours

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought. ↗

— Vaclav Havel

#absurdity #deeper #experience #in other words #meaning

The bond between a parent and child is the primary bond, the foundation for the rest of the child's life. The presence or absence of this bond determines much about the child's resiliency and what kind of adult they will grow up to be. ↗

— Jane Fonda

#absence #adult #between #bond #child

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. ↗

— Zhuangzi

#happiness #striving

Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence. ↗

— Dorothy Thompson

#aggressive #alternatives #conflict #creative #passive

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. ↗

— Orson Welles

#art #enemy #limitations