“This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”

“Absence is more,thorny on the soul,than however dulcet,presence can be.Apparently,I have missed you,more than,I have ever loved you.”

“If this turns to friendship, it only meansThat one of us will suffer.That when we meet after the worst of endings,There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leavingBehind a bluer sky each moment of departure.And one of us will cling on to its blue,Hung on partings like a muted cloud, whileThe other rides on a wing of word away from here.”

“Always in my love, sudden night.Always in myself, my enemy.And always in my always, the same absence.”

“The value of knowledge is best appreciated in its absence.”

“Rulers are not anointed. They are created by the void of self-mastery.”

“Detachment is not the absence of emotion, it is the process of becoming one with the Oneness that is the Universe. To be detached, is to realize that the fullness of all there is, is too much to react to with just one emotion, one thought, or any bias. To be detached, is to acknowledge all, without owning any of it. To be detached, is to summon forth the whole entirety of understanding, to the fragment that is the void.”

“And,” Annabeth continued, “it reminds me how long we’ve known each other. We were twelve, Percy. Can you believe that?”“No, he admitted. “So…you knew you liked me from that moment?”She smirked. “I hated you at first. You annoyed me. Then I tolerated you for a few years. Then—”“Okay, fine.”She leaned in and kissed: him a good, proper kiss without anyone watching—no Romans anywhere, no screaming satyr chaperones. She pulled away. “I missed you, Percy.”Percy wanted to tell her the same thing, but it seemed too small a comment. While he had been on the Roman side, he’d kept himself alive almost solely by thinking of Annabeth. I missed you didn’t really cover that.”

“Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.”

“Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.”

“Growth in love comes from a place of absence, where the imagination is left to it’s own devices and creates you to be much more then reality would ever allow.”

“Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.
”

“Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.”

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, […]”

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re together.” He didn’t say you’re okay, or we’re alive. After all they’d been through over the last year, he knew that the most important thing was that they were together. She loved him for saying that.”