C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Parting
In every parting there is an image of death.
We only part to meet again.
Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
And by and by, will there come a time, when souls congenial will no more say adieu?
One last long sigh to love and thee, then back to busy life again.
Such partings break the heart they fondly hope to heal.
To die and part is a less evil; but to part and live, there, there is the torment.
Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.
Parting is worse than death; it is death of love!
Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.
The air is full of farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead.
So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.
But fate ordains that dearest friends must part.
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.
If we must part forever, give me but one kind word to think upon and please myself with, while my heart is breaking.
There is such sweet pain in parting that I could hang forever on thine arms, and look away my life into thine eyes.
The man who leaves a woman best pleased with herself is the one whom she will soonest wish to see.
The parting of a husband and wife is like the cleaving of a heart; one half will flutter here, one there.
But still her lips refused to say, farewell; for in that word, that fatal word, howe’er we promise, hope, believe, there breathes despair.
Will our souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream?
Abruptness is an eloquence in parting, when spinning out the time is but the weaving of new sorrow.
Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again. I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, that almost freezes up the heat of life.
Oh! wherefore doth thou soothe me with thy softness? why doth thou wind thyself about my heart, and make this separation painful to us?
Beware of parting! The true sadness is not in the pain of the parting; it is in the when and the how you are to meet again with the face about to vanish from your view.
Time, which deadens hatred, secretly strengthens love; and in the hour of threatened separation its growth is manifested at once in radiant brightness.
The consciousness of being loved softens the keenest pangs, even at the moment of parting; yea, even the eternal farewell is robbed of half its bitterness when uttered in accepts that breathe love to the last sigh.
We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolators of the old. We do not believe in the richness of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence.
Parting and forgetting? What faithful heart can do these? Our great thoughts, our great affections, the truths of our life, never leave us. Surely they cannot separate from our consciousness; shall follow it whithersoever that shall go; and are of their nature divine and immortal.
A chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and Time’s busy fingers are not practised in re-splicing broken ties. Meet again you may; will it be in the same way? with the same sympathies? with the same sentiments? Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream? Rarely, rarely.