Simone Giertz Quotes

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

I cannot do what you have asked me to do.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again.

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

Asks the Possible of the Impossible, "Where is your dwelling-place?" "In the dreams of the Impotent," comes the answer.

I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse -- borne away with every breath!

My soul's the present shadow of a presence gone.

Sometimes you cannot help what you hear, you cannot help what you see.

How can you miss someone who’s right beside you?

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing - the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

But as was so often the case, it was the one person missing who you thought about more than the ones who were right in front of you.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.

After dinner, I become afraid despite myself. I know I should be joyous, for this reunion is the proof that love can still be ours, but I know the bell has tolled this evening. The sun has long since set and the thief is about to come, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. So I stare at her and wait and live a lifetime in these last remaining moments.

When I wake you're never there, but when I sleep you're everywhere.

It is the same among the men and women, as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, that beauty can never be grasped? In persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible?

I couldn't have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

For where thou art, there is the world itself, With every several pleasure in the world, And where thou art not, desolation.

All days are nights to see till I see thee, And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to.

Places that are empty of you are empty of life.

I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.

Nobody can miss you unless you go away.

Because death is the only thing that could have ever kept him from you.