Absence Makes The Heart Forget Quotes

Absence makes the heart grow fonder… or forgetful.

The American church avoids lament. The power of lament is minimized and the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost. But absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American church results in the loss of memory. We forget the necessity of lamenting over suffering and pain. We forget the reality of suffering and pain.

Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.

And that’s the worst of it, the part no one ever tells you about.” “What part?” he said, his voice still clenched with grief. “How it never stops. How the pain of missing people never stops. When you burn your finger in a fire, it hurts, but it only hurts one way because you know what caused the pain and why the pain is there, and you know that it will settle, in a bit. But heart pain has facets, Silas. A thousand different sides, sharp and hard; most of them you don’t even know exist, even when you’re looking straight at them. When someone leaves, or dies, or doesn’t love you in return, well, you may think you know why your heart hurts. But wrapped in there are a hundred kinds of fear all tangled in a knot you can’t untie. Nobody wants to be alone. We all fear being left alone, being left behind. I know such things exist. But you must learn to see death as something more than loss, more than absence, more than silence. You must learn to make mourning into memory. For once a person takes leave of his life, that life becomes so much more a part of ours. In death, they come to be in our keeping. The dead find their rest within us. Thus, in remembrance, we are never alone. But people forget the power of memory. So we fear death in the deepest place of our very being, because we don’t know that memories make us immortal. We focus instead on being gone and the awful mystery behind absence. Love and death—and those two are very closely bound together—scare us because we can’t control them. We fear what we can’t control. That fear is really part of what makes us human, but mostly, we’re just afraid of the ends of stories we can’t foresee.

Each morning I wake up, Thinking of you. Every night I sleep, Dreaming about us. I remember you're not with me, And it makes me feel blue. I miss your smile, I miss your touch, My heart aches so much, With your absence. You're so far away from me, Yet I can still feel you within me. I would forget about passing time, If I look into your eyes. I know, the distance is through the miles, But not between our loving hearts.

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder; it makes people forget.

Absence makes the heart grow forgetful.

Sitting with Jesus in his light Shedding to the innermost depths of the soul. Sweet light, joyous light, you the unmade who made me, enlighten the contours and working of my inward eye with unmade clarity. Shine into my mind so that it is wholly cleansed and so exalted by your gifts that it rushes into the full happiness of love. Kindle it with your sweet fire so that I may sit in you, Jesus, and rest there full of joy, walking about as if ravished by heavenly sweetness and always beholding unseen things. Let me be glad in God alone. Everlasting love, inflame my soul until I love God so much that nothing burns in me but his desires. Good Jesus, no one but you can help me so to feel you that I feel no one and nothing but you, and see no one and nothing but you. Shed yourself into the innermost depths of my soul. Come into my heart and fill it with your clearest sweetness. Moisten my mind with your sweet love’s hot wine so that I forget all unhappiness and all ridiculous dreams. Let me be happy only in your presence in me and rejoice only in Jesus, my God. From now on, sweetest Lord, do not leave me. Stay with me wholeheartedly in all your sweetness, for my only comfort is your presence and only your absence can make me sorrowful. —Richard Rolle, The Love of God

Volumnia, who is attempting to infuse some of her own stalwart qualities into her daughter-in-law: If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love. (1.3.2–5) Is it possible to imagine anything more perverse? Not only is Volumnia declaring that she prefers a warrior who is absent (and in mortal danger on the battlefield) to a husband who is present in her bed—this much could be chalked up to Roman heroic virtue—but the whole assertion rests on the premise of herself as her son’s husband. And this, let’s not forget, spoken to the individual who actually does share “his bed where he would show most love.” It renders by comparison rather colorless the son-husband comparison with which All’s Well begins. With the fate of Rome hanging in the balance, the husbandless mother of the hero/savior edges toward absurdity, as when Menenius, trying vainly to stage manage the hero’s role in making peace with the plebeians, is forced to say to him, “is this the promise you made your mother?” (3.3.87), which sounds to me like a laugh line delivered on the playground or something I heard in my head at a prepubescent age, not an exhortation to decisive political action in the Roman forum. But Shakespeare has woven, ominously (or so it appears to me), another thread into the fabric of Coriolanus’s Rome. With the ferocious mother-fatherlover rolled into one at the center of this particular Roman world, it seems as though perversity is on the loose everywhere. Nothing in the rulebook of epic heroism accords with Coriolanus’s rapturous reception of his ally Cominius, O, let me clip ye In arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart As merry as when our nuptial day was done. … (1.7.29–31)

The poets had it all wrong. Absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder. It made the heart forget.