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.
The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the purpose of historians to say, 'No! It's very complicated.' _x000D_ _x000D_ The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.
Being of color in America by no means amounts to a constant barrage of negativity. However, unlike being white, being of color means one's race is a constant issue.
'Smart growth' destroys the environment. 'Dumb growth' destroys the environment. The only difference is that 'smart growth' does it with good taste. It's like booking passage on the Titanic. Whether you go first-class or steerage, the result is the same.
Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.
Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated - there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.
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