43 Separation Quotes For Reflection

Separation is a multifaceted experience, affecting not just our hearts but also our minds and spirits. Whether it's the end of a relationship, the parting of ways with a friend, or a geographical separation from a loved one, these moments offer a unique opportunity for introspection and growth. To help navigate these often turbulent waters, we've curated a thoughtful collection of 43 quotes that delve into the essence of separation. Each quote has been chosen not only for its emotional resonance but also for its capacity to inspire reflection and healing. Join us as we explore these powerful words and find solace, wisdom, and perhaps even a bit of hope amidst the feelings of distance and longing.

1. “And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.” - Pablo Neruda

2. “She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.” - Charles Frazier

3. “Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.” - Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

4. “Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” - Joseph Fort Newton

5. “I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart.” - Nicholas Sparks

6. “There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.” - Elizabeth Berg

7. “The day he moved out was terrible – That evening she went through hell.His absence wasn’t a problemBut the corkscrew had gone as well.” - Wendy Cope

8. “Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel I remember wondering to be always together yet forever apart?” - Nicholas Sparks

9. “Your relationship may be "Breaking Up," but you won't be "Breaking Down." If anything your correcting a mistake that was hurting four people, you and the person your with, not to mention the two people who you were destined to meet.” - D. Ivan Young

10. “[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.” - Orson Scott Card

11. “What is certain is this, that I never rested in that way again, my feet obscenely resting on the earth, my arms on the handlebars and on my arms my head, rocking and abandoned. It is indeed a delporable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and joy, without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground.” - Samuel Beckett

12. “I'll never see them again. I know that. And they know that. And knowing this, we say farewell.” - Haruki Murakami

13. “All discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else.” - Mae West

14. “I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.” - Maggie Stiefvater

15. “In China, we say: 'There are many dreams in a long night.' It has been a long night, but I don't know if I want to continue the dreams. It feels like I am walking on a little path, both sides are dark mountains and valleys. I am walking towards a little light in the distance. Walking, and walking, I am seeing that light diminishing. I am seeing myself walk towards the end of the love, the sad end.I love you more than I loved you before. I love you more than I should love you. But I must leave. I am losing myself. It is painful that I can't see myself. It is time for me to say those words you kept telling me recently. 'Yes, I agree with you. We can't be together.” - Xiaolu Guo

16. “There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.” - kate dicamillo

17. “Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement from nature leaves us wanting,and when we want there is never enough. Our insatiable wanting is called greed. It is a major source of our destructive dependencies and violence.” - Michael J. Cohen

18. “Scrubbing the floor when no one else wanted to was something that my mother would have done. If I can't be with her, the least I can do is act like her sometimes.” - Veronica Roth

19. “We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.” - Audrey Niffenegger

20. “abyss, n.There are times when I doubt everything. When I regret everything you've taken from me, everything I've given you, and the waste of all the time I've spent on us.” - David Levithan

21. “Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.” - John le Carré

22. “Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!” - Héloïse

23. “Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that’s all.We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness.” - Haruki Murakami

24. “Tevis dēļ es esmu pratis daudz/. Esmu kāvies, cīnījies un cirties.Tikai vienu nepratu nekad - pašā 'īstākajā brīdī šķirties.” - Imants Ziedonis

25. “My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.” - Richard Bach

26. “Does sorry change anyth? No. Never welcom a sorry from som1 who was conscious at the scene and just couldn't help him self out of trouble.” - Yannick KABETSHI

27. “I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only - still, I left.” - Mihail Drumeş

28. “their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other's presence, a new serenity.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. “Up in the distance the whistle of the wind sang to her from the mountain. From Lucian’s mountain. It beckoned and taunted and she wanted to run towards it. To be enveloped in its coat of fleece and to hear its safe sounds.” - Melina Marchetta

30. “The flesh covers the bones, and makes the spirit naked.” - Anthony Liccione

31. “Why don’t you just pretend that the asshole dropped dead? You can’t call or write to a dead man. Put a couple of candles in front of his picture, say a few Hail Marys, and get it over with.” - Isabel Lopez

32. “Whenever there is a break up, it's usually not the fault of just one party. Both are usually at fault” - Louis N. Jones

33. “And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government? The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.” - G.K. Chesterton

34. “You know, for a while there we kept horses for the boys, and we had a mare that had broken down. Couldn't ride it... You could feed it and brush it and water it and all. Sometimes, I've thought that's what most marriages get to. A horse you still care a little about but cannot any longer ride.” - Tom McNeal

35. “All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated To go peacefully And enjoy the eternal nap.” - Dejan Stojanovic

36. “You know that saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I already did know what I had, and now that she’s gone, I know even more.” - A.S. King

37. “How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.” - Amitav Ghosh

38. “You cannot force things apart that are bound at the heart.” - Ashly Lorenzana

39. “He watched Warrick walk away across the café, and started sentences in his mind. Don't go yet. I want five minutes, that's all. One minute. I want you. This could be the last time I see you. This really could be the last time. I want you to—” - Manna Francis

40. “Fear and hate create separation, love and joy creates belongingness and wholeness.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

41. “Becoming aware of our inner man and woman means to discover the roots and creative potential of both the male and female aspect within ourselves. Becoming aware of the inner man and woman means to understand that they have different visions of life. It means to understand that they have different perspectives and views of life. The inner man and woman are our two wings of love and freedom. Through awareness, acceptance and understanding, we can allow our two wings to develop in a deep and natural harmony. In the world today, a one-sided development of the male side leads to destructivity. A one-sided development of the male side leads to ego, struggle, exhaustion and a separation from life. A one-sided development of the female side leads to passivity and dependence.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

42. “His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky...The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn't been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn't stopped whirling.” - Claire Vaye Watkins

43. “Marriage to the groom does not means that his heart belongs to the bride.” - Dennis E. Adonis