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.
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
Holiness provokes hatred. The greater the holiness, the greater the human hostility toward it. It seems insane. No man was ever more loving than Jesus Christ. Yet even His love made people angry. His love was a perfect love, a transcendent and holy love, but HIs very love brought trauma to people. This kind of love is so majestic we can't stand it.
All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.
Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
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