W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

They say that time heals a broken heart, but time has stood still since we've been apart.

The absence of the beloved, short though it may last, always lasts too long.

D'ye think I don't know?" he asked softly. "It's me that has the easy part now. For if ye feel for me as I do for you-then I'm asking you to tear out your heart and live without it.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The heart was made to be broken.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

The book [The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane] is about the fact that living in this world means that your heart is necessarily going to get broken. But the book also says that's okay. That's the only way to live a truly human life - with your heart getting broken - and eventually getting flooded with love.

There is no balm of Gilead, No salve, no soothing ointment To stay the pain of one who's had In love a disappointment-- Unless it be that healing lotion Of fixing on a new devotion.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

And I kissed away a thousand tears My lady of the Various Sorrows Some begged, some borrowed, some stolen Some kept safe for tomorrow.

Letting go of someone we love is the hardest thing we will ever do. Some people never surrender to love for the fear of being hurt. But to not have loved, to not have felt the immense joy it brings, would have been a far worse kind of death.

When one lover suffered from a broken heart, no matter how badly the other wanted to help, she couldn't be the one to heal it.

... I think we grieve forever, but that goes for love too, fortunately for us all.

Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

Take love when love is given, But never think to find it A sure escape from sorrow Or a complete repose.

Time heals all wounds.

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

Our hours in love have wings; in absence, crutches.

It's hard asking someone with a broken heart to fall in love again.

Every play I write is about love and distance. And time. And from that we can get things like history.