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.
As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: "What is his point of reference here?" But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.
Over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And LIBERTARIANS had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let's spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.
Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.
The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business.
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.
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