Quotes about abandonment
Mira Bartok - The Memory Palace
What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you're the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own.
Lamine Pearlheart - The Sunrise Scrolls: To Life from the Shadows II
You are not abandoned until you feel that you are! - On Being Abandoned.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest
People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of of actually disappearing. They left, but didn't, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should have been.
Mike Klepper -
Abandoning civil society will leave the enemy in control, not by victory but by default.
Christina Enevoldsen - The Rescued Soul: The Writing Journey for the Healing of Incest and Family Betrayal
The fear of abandonment forced me to comply as a child, but I’m not forced to comply anymore. The key people in my life did reject me for telling the truth about my abuse, but I’m not alone. Even if the consequence for telling the truth is rejection from everyone I know, that’s not the same death threat that it was when I was a child. I’m a self-sufficient adult and abandonment no longer means the end of my life.
Pete Walker -
I am continuously struck by how frequently the various thought processes of the inner critic trigger overwhelming emotional flashbacks. This is because the PTSD-derived inner critic weds shame and self-hate about imperfection to fear of abandonment, and mercilessly drive the psyche with the entwined serpents of perfectionism and endangerment. Recovering individuals must learn to recognize, confront and disidentify from the many inner critic processes that tumble them back in emotional time to th
Justin K. McFarlane Beau -
Turning your back on nothing and walking away is not disloyal, it's self respect.
Garth Risk Hallberg - City on Fire
In a blacked-out house, stripped of all comforts, it's easy to turn your anger outward, to attack this city he's lying at the center of, with its filth and its pollution and its oppression, but really, New York is the only thing that's never abandoned him.
Sarah E. Olson -
Howard: Sometimes a betrayal can be so subtle that it clouds the whole thing.Nita: It would have to be a real betrayal. Not like canceling an appointment. It would be like you’d end the relationship in the middle.Howard: Why would I call it off?Nita: I don’t know!
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.
Clementine von Radics - Mouthful of Forevers
You told me mornings were the best time to break your own heart. So here I am, smoking your brand of cigarettes for the scent. I wonder if you still sing Beatles songs as you make coffee. You said your mother used to sing them to you when you couldn’t sleep, nineteen years before we met, twenty before you moved your clothes out of our closet while I was at work. By the way, I hate you for leaving all the photographs on the fridge. Taking them down felt like peeling off new scabs, like slapping a
Terry Tempest Williams - When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
For far too long we have been seduced into walking a path that did not lead us to ourselves. For far too long we have said yes when we wanted to say no. And for far too long we have said no when we desperately wanted to say yes. . . . When we don't listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don't, others will abandon us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
The very places that we presume God not to be are the very places that are filled with His footprints and littered with His fingerprints.
Carolyn Spring - Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices
And if we do speak out, we risk rejection and ridicule. I had a best friend once, the kind that you go shopping with and watch films with, the kind you go on holiday with and rescue when her car breaks down on the A1. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told her I had DID. I haven't seen her since. The stench and rankness of a socially unacceptable mental health disorder seems to have driven her away.
Pete Walker -
Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of
Alice Miller - The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
I've spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had repeatedly been abandoned by his mother.
Flora Rheta Schreiber - Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
She'd abandoned the animal she loved as she herself had been abandoned repeatedly in the past by people who had claimed to love her.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
The problem that I think I have with God is often not a problem at all. Rather, it is most frequently a tired misperception where I have made God what I need Him to be in order to justify my rejection of Him.
Arthur Nersesian - Dogrun
I lay in bed and watched moments break into phenomenal particles of panic and could actually see the divine crack of God’s ass as he completely turned his back on me.
J. Jeffrey Means -
When basic human needs are ignored, rejected, or invalidated by those in roles and positions to appropriately meet them; when the means by which these needs have been previously met are no longer available: and when prior abuse has already left one vulnerable for being exploited further, the stage is set for the possibility these needs will be prostituted. This situation places a survivor who has unmet needs in an incredible dilemma. She can either do without or seek the satisfaction of mobilize
Christina Enevoldsen -
The introduction to horrors so young impressed on me just how helpless and vulnerable I was. Parents are supposed to empower their children to live without them but in my family, I wasn’t given permission to be my own person. I thought I needed them to live and then they abandoned me. It’s no wonder I felt so unempowered well into my adult years.
Amit Kalantri -
Any work is always improvable, you cannot really finish the work, you can only abandon it out of tiredness or incompetence.
John Geddes - A Familiar Rain
...in January, everything seems desolate. The Moon ascends to cold heights - and I, a ragged sky filled with dark kisses...lie abandoned by you...
N.R. Walker - Book Three
They should love you, just as you are. Parents should love their kids, right?" "You'd think so.
Madhu Vajpayee - Seeking Redemption
it seemed that the pain of their physical illness at times was less than the misery of their poverty ridden existence, the unending wait in the queues and the feeling of hopelessness and abandonment by your own system was enough to rob them of their will power to fight any disease.
NoViolet Bulawayo - We Need New Names
And so the spirits just gazed at us with eyes milked dry of care.
Marnie Grundman - Missing A True Story Of A Childhood Lost
Keep your heart wide open and you’ll be received with open hearts — not by everyone, but to be received by one open heart is more than worth the journey.
Lena Dunham - Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Remember when you discovered your father owned a book called "How To Disappear and Never Be Found?" You're sure it was just research for new and creative ways of thinking, for concepts that might apply to his work, but it raised the distinct possibility that there is something very upsetting that people you love could do instead of dying.
John Daniel Thieme - paulinskill hours and other poems
we lived depravityand called it truth, silencingour dreaming, andour love, discardingthings holy.
Kate McGahan -
When you give everything, you have nothing to lose.
Ann Douglas -
Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.
Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Everything you need comes into focus when you abandon the unneeded.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - The Little Prince
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the time for him to leave was approaching:"Oh!", said the fox. "I am going to cry.""It's your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any harm; but you wanted me to tame you...""I know," said the fox."And now you're going to cry!" said the little prince."I know," said the fox."So you have gained nothing from it at all!""Yes, I have gained something," said the fox, "because of the colour of the corn.
Amy Gentry - Good as Gone
Maybe once you've been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again. Maybe you're destined to be abandoned even by your own guts, maybe your foot walks off with your thighbone, why not, stranger things have happened.
Kami Garcia -
every loss, every mistake, was seared into her soul, creating a different kind of tattoo, one made from rage and abandonment, heart break and tears
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
To simply survive appears to be the choice of the plodding hoards that wander all around me. Therefore, I’ve adamantly committed to never hoard hoards.
Kenny Guinn -
I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our devoted attention, not our divided attention.
Sarah Addison Allen - First Frost
But Claire had long ago realized, even after those constant dreams of her mother leaving faded away, that when you are abandoned as a child, you are never able to forget that people are capable of leaving, even if they never do.
Rosamund Lupton - Sister
For years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at the university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn't want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult.
Greg Rucka - Vol. 4: Poison
For those he has ignored, he allows them this. He allows them God, their only ally. Places to worship, but no one to teach.
Terry Tempest Williams - When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
When I look in the mirror, I see a woman with secrets. When we don’t listen to our intuition, we abandon our souls. And we abandon our souls because we are afraid if we don’t, others will abandon us.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
When surrounded by the ashes of all that I once cherished, despite my best efforts I can find no room to be thankful. But standing there amidst endless ash I must remember that although the ashes surround me, God surrounds the ashes. And once that realization settles upon me, I am what I thought I could never be ... I am thankful for ashes.
Melody Beattie -
We Are Lovable Even if the most important person in your world rejects you, you are still real, and you are still okay. —Codependent No More Do you ever find yourself thinking: How could anyone possibly love me? For many of us, this is a deeply ingrained belief that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking we are unlovable can sabotage our relationships with co-workers, friends, family members, and other loved ones. This belief can cause us to choose, or stay in, relationships that are le
Donna Lynn Hope -
I shall not be defined by what I have suffered but how I have endured them.
Tennessee Williams -
The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello - Goodbye!" and no address.
Anne Ursu - The Real Boy
Hugging himself, Oscar leaned against the pantry wall. For two days all he had wanted was for Caleb to come back, and now he was back and Oscar had made a mess of things: he had angered half the customers and confused the other half, and the coin boxes did not look as they should, and [rich, noble] people were complaining about him, and he couldn't look at anybody, and [redacted] was dead, and Oscar was odd.'What if he doesn't keep me?
Jenim Dibie - The Calligraphy of God
The sun loved me again when it saw that the stars would not abandon me.
Charles M. Schulz - Charlie Brown!
There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness, but the most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run t
Yuuki Obata - Vol. 1
You don’t know what it means to be betrayed! Should I explain it to you? It means to be treated like trash and your feelings get stepped on…you get hurt over and over again and in the end you are left alone!Can’t you see how much I care for you? How hard I’m trying to connect with you?When did I ever betray you? When did I ever leave you alone?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - and Selections from The House of the De
May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed...
Phoebe Stone - The Romeo And Juliet Code
Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes.
Alexandra Katehakis - Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence
When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life.
Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream...
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
There’s not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places.
A.S. Peterson - Fiddler's Green
Turn it beautiful. His words came faintly at first, but they came again and again, always softly, always with the insistence of an elder commanding wisdom. Turn it all to beauty. She walked to the rail. When she turned and sat upon it, she heard a sailor in the crowd murmur that she might play them a tune. She hoped he was right. She needed the voices to be wrong. Fin raised the instrument to the cleft of her neck and closed her eyes. She emptied her mind and let herself be carried back to her e
Eda J. Vor - Lay Her Ghosts to Rest
It must be difficult to be a mother,” she continued thoughtfully. “To create and nurture and raise a tiny person, to invest all of your heart in it, only to have them grow up and not need you anymore. It must hurt to feel that kind of abandonment. To be forced to let go because of time and nature and the well-being of… both the child and the mother, I suppose?
Joan Bauer -
I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that spoke volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you've ached over, sweated over. (Thwonk)
Héloïse d'Argenteuil - The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in this one thing thou shouldst have had little trust in me I vehemently grieved and was ashamed. For I (God [knows]) would without hesitation precede or follow thee to the Vulcanian fires according to thy word. For not with me was my heart, but with thee. But now, more than ever, if it be not with thee,
Patsy Asuncion -
It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso
Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian
Recently abandoned women can be complicated.
Olivia Sudjic - Sympathy
I went back to my room and spent all night contemplating whether it was possible in life not to be constantly let down. If it could ever be worth pinning your happiness to another person, when all other people ever seemed to do was disappear.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Things becomes invisible at the very moment I refuse to grant them importance. And while I am utterly ashamed to admit it, many of the most important things in my life are invisible.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
God’s absence in the carnage is due to one single rather unnerving fact; that at some time past He honored our request that He leave. And if we are not brutally honest with ourselves regarding that choice, it is we ourselves who have set the stage for the next tragedy.
Sarah Dessen - This Lullaby
Wherever you will go, I will let you down, But this lullaby goes on.
Christopher Hawke -
It’s strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next. After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility, hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves helpless. We strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells us the
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.
Sharon Creech - Walk Two Moons
I had not said anything about what had happened the day before—about being scared down to my very bones when I thought they had left me. I don't know what came over me. Ever since my mother left us that April day, I suspected that everyone was going to leave, one by one.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Far too often, it is at the moment where we finally stand on the very precipice of some great thing that we turn and abandon it, for it is at these seminal moments that fear wins and greatness dies. The beauty of Christmas is that God steps over precipices.
Laura Kinsale - Flowers from the Storm
He didn’t reckon that God owed him anything. He reckoned that he’d had it all, and wasted it. Burning lakes and howling fiends had just never seemed that convincing, perils hardly fit to frighten naughty children.He turned over, staring up at the darkess.Damned…having found out now what hell was really like.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Sadly, in too many cases surrender is having been ‘outrun’ by fear rather than having ‘run out’ of heart.
bell hooks - All About Love: New Visions
A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade - Abandonment to Divine Providence
There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.
Ha Jin - Waiting
Once you've done it with him, he won't abandon you. If he really loves you, if he's a man with a heart, he'll follow you wherever you go. If he doesn't, he isn't the man you want, is he?
Yuuki Obata - Vol. 1
The person whom you really, really love may not be here anymore. And you might be feeling lonely, but, there are people in this world who really, really love you, so shouldn't that equal it all out? So, please don't ever think that you're alone. I'll be watching over you. I'll always be watching over you. I promise to always watch over you. You're not alone.
Pablo Neruda -
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
Kate McGahan - Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
She made me her everything. She didn’t realize then that when you make someone your everything, when they are gone you have nothing left. I have since learned that our Master sends us soul mates who teach us to depend on them and then we come to believe we cannot live without them. Then He takes them away to prove to us that we can indeed live without them, but also to prove that we cannot live without Him.
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.
Vironika Tugaleva -
I wanted, for so long, for someone to understand me better than I understood myself, to take control of me, to save me, to make it all better. I thought that the hardest part of a loving, mutually healing relationship would be showing my vulnerable, raw spots to a person, even though I'd been hurt so many times before. This has not been the hardest part. The actual hardest part has been realizing that no one, no matter how compassionate and kind they are, will say the perfect things always. Myse
Julie Kagawa - The Iron King
Leaving would imply suitcases and empty drawers, and late birthday cards with ten-dollar bills stuffed inside.
George Hodgman -
People mean well; they just aren't here enough to get what we are dealing with or what home means to my mother. Everyone thinks they know what should be done, and their suggestions make me suspect they must consider me an idiot who doesn't comprehend the situation.
Ashly Lorenzana -
They say blood is thicker than water. It's also more treacherous, prone to betrayal, full of shit and quite honestly, I wouldn't put much weight into it at all.
Brian A. McBride - Dominion
The sun does not abandon the moon to darkness.
Gregory Maguire - A Lion Among Men
Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.
Ashly Lorenzana - Speed Needles
It took me years to stop feeling the guilt she made sure I kept feeling about what happened with him. He is a sick person that molests children, but I felt so bad about it for so long. I couldn't talk to a single person about any of this. No one. And she made me feel so bad about it all that I felt I shouldn't talk about it, even if there was someone. I felt ashamed and thought I was an awful person. Sometimes I still do. My mother abandoned me in the worst ways possible.
Katie Douglas -
Each drop hits the pavement;A soft, incoherent shatter below.Here I stand in torturous observanceOf this strange disappearing act.
Christine Celis - Snippets of Imagery
Last night, I realized that it is possible for love to die in an instant. It felt sickening to lie with you in the same bed and have your arms wrapped tightly around me. It no longer felt right.
KayeC Jones - Mason the Mutt
He tried not to cry as he wondered if he would ever have a home again.
Sarah Thebarge -
...in addition to feeling sick and tired and feverish and nauseated, I also felt forgotten. And there was no easy cure for that.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
Bryant McGill - Voice of Reason
There are possibilities that exist beyond our present "knowing," and to see those possibilities, we must abandon that which makes us feel safe.
bell hooks - All About Love: New Visions
Those who choose to walk on love's path are well served if they have a guide. That guide can enable us to overcome fear if we trust that they will not lead us astray or abandon us along the way.
Nathan Hill - The Nix
Years later, in a high-school biology class, Samuel heard a story about a certain kind of African turtle that swam across the ocean to lay its eggs in South America. Scientists could find no reason for the enormous trip. Why did the turtles do it? The leading theory was that they began doing eons ago, when South America and Africa were still locked together. Back then, only a river might have separated the continents, and the turtles laid their eggs on the river's far bank. But then the continen
Oliver Markus - Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends
Envy is the desire to have what someone else has. Jealousy is the fear of losing what you have. The more insecure you are about yourself or your relationship, the more jealous you are, because you are afraid to lose your significant other to someone else.
J.E.B. Spredemann - Amish by Accident
It was then that she realized she still had God. He was the only one who hadn't left her. He knew who she was, even if she didn't. A single tear formed in the corner of her eye as she thanked God for not abandoning her - especially when she needed Him most.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe - The Vision
In the way that you need to clear the way to make a road, those who betray and abandon you expose things you need to remove from your life. They reveal the mistakes you made in trusting them and how you can avoid them in the future, and move on.
Alex George - Setting Free the Kites
When he left us, he stole all the words.
Ann Druyan - A Famous Broken Heart: A Fantasy Novel
Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don't know which place to long for.
Emily Williams - Letters to Eloise
The feeling of abandonment overwhelmed me as I realised that no one had waited, or cared where I was.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.