It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts.
Interpretation
The absence of someone or something can change our perception and understanding of them over time.
This quote highlights the idea that when a person or thing is no longer present, it allows us the opportunity to reflect and re-evaluate our thoughts and feelings about them. Over time, our memories can reshape their significance and impact on our lives, revealing deeper truths that were perhaps not fully appreciated while they were present.
In practice
In a remembrance speech, one might say, 'As we reflect on their absence, we find that they have shaped our lives in ways we are just beginning to understand.'
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.
You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.
Great men cultivate love...only little men cherish a spirit of hatred
I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong.
There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.
It is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminals' and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.
The iron bolt...mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in a gloomy prison.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
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