Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquest of it.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Why is love intensified by absence?
Absence, with all its pains, is, by this charming moment, wiped away.
Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence.
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
Health is not simply the absence of sickness.