90 Quotes About Abandonment

It’s hard to be abandoned, especially when we’re young. But we must learn to acknowledge and accept the pain of loss, and move on. The best way to deal with abandonment is to realize that it happens for a reason. A time may come when you feel like you will never find love again Read more

If you’re feeling low and lonely, here are some quotes about abandonment to help motivate you and remind you that life isn’t always fair.

Wherever you will go, I will let you down, But...
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Wherever you will go, I will let you down, But this lullaby goes on. Sarah Dessen
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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. Craig D. Lounsbrough
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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. Olivia Sudjic
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will...
4
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air. Pablo Neruda
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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. Yuuki Obata
6
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. . Kate McGahan
We walked to meet each other up at the time...
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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. Leo Tolstoy
8
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. Myself included. The hardest part has been learning to communicate what I need, to hear what others need, to tell others how to tell me what they need. Intimacy takes communication. A lot of it. We all have triggers. I don't know your triggers, and you don't know mine. No matter how much I love or trust you, you cannot possibly know exactly the words I need to hear, the words I don't want to hear, and the way I like to be touched. And how strange that we expect these things of each other. How strange (and self-sabotaging) that we refuse to get into relationships and friendships with people unless they treat us in just that perfect way. We've been raised to want fairy tales. We've been raised to wait for flawless saviors to rescue us. But the savior isn't flawless and the savior is not coming. The savior is you. The savior is still learning. The savior is never done learning. The savior is a human being. Forget perfect. Forget flawless. And start speaking your truth. Start speaking what you want and how you want it. And start asking and listening, really listening, to what the people around you say. Maybe, then, we will stop abandoning and hurting each other. Maybe, then, there's hope for us. Vironika Tugaleva
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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. JeanPierre De Caussade
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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. Bell Hooks
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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. Laura Kinsale
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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. Sharon Creech
Once you've done it with him, he won't abandon you....
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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? Ha Jin
It takes one a long time to become young. -...
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It takes one a long time to become young. - Picasso Patsy Asuncion
Recently abandoned women can be complicated.
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Recently abandoned women can be complicated. Elizabeth Kostova
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[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, it is nowhere. For without thee it cannot anywhere exist. Unknown
17
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 earliest memory, the first pain she ever knew: the knowledge that her parents didn’t want her. The despair of rejection coursed through her. It fathered a knot of questions that bound her, enveloped her. Waves of uncertainty and frailty shook her to the bones. Her body quivered with anger and hopelessness. She reeled on the edge of a precipice. She wanted to scream or to throw her fists but she held it inside; she struggled to control it. She fought to subjugate her pain, but it grew. It welled up; it filled her mind. When she could hold it no more, exhausted by defiance and wearied by years of pretending not to care, Bartimaeus’s words surrounded her. Got to turn it beautiful. She dropped her defenses. She let weakness fill her. She accepted it. And the abyss yawned. She tottered over the edge and fell. The forces at war within her raced down her arms and set something extraordinary in motion; they became melody and harmony: rapturous, golden. Her fingers coaxed the long-silent fiddle to life. They danced across the strings without hesitation, molding beauty out of the miraculous combination of wood, vibration, and emotion. The music was so bright she felt she could see it. The poisonous voices were outsung. Notes raged out of her in a torrent. She had such music within her that her bones ached with it, the air around her trembled with it, her veins bled it. The men around fell still and silent. Some slipped to the deck and sat enraptured like children before a travelling bard. A.S. Peterson
18
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). Joan Bauer
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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? Eda J. Vor
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Leaving would imply suitcases and empty drawers, and late birthday cards with ten-dollar bills stuffed inside. Julie Kagawa
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Each drop hits the pavement; A soft, incoherent shatter below. Here I stand in torturous observance Of this strange disappearing act. Katie Douglas
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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. Ashly Lorenzana
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The sun does not abandon the moon to darkness. Brian A. McBride
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Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence. Gregory Maguire
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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. George Hodgman
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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. Ashly Lorenzana
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Do not conform to seek the seekers, but leave the leavers. Wisdom comes from facing what you do not yet understand. Shannon L. Alder
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Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time, they should have mastered the following tasks:1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving up a sense of self and one‘s freedom to be apart, 2. The ability to say appropriate no's to others without fear of loss of love, 3. The ability to take appropriate no's from others without withdrawing emotionally. Noting these tasks, a friend said half-joking, "They need to learn this by age three? How about by fourty-three?" Yes, these are tall orders but boundary development is essential in the early years of life. . Henry Cloud
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There are possibilities that exist beyond our present "knowing, " and to see those possibilities, we must abandon that which makes us feel safe. Bryant McGill
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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. Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
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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. J.E.B. Spredemann
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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. Bell Hooks
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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 continents began drifting apart, and the river widened by about an inch per year, which would have been invisible to the turtles. So they kept going to the same spot, the far bank of the river, each generation swimming a tiny bit farther than the last one, and after a hundred million years of this, the river had become an ocean, and yet the turtles never noticed. This, Samuel decided, was the manner of his mother's departure. This was how she moved away - imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit. Nathan Hill
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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. Oliver Markus
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Now, we all have stories of how we got here, and prob-probably some of you feel angry who whoever it is who's left you here. But you must try and remember that they were like that because that's how they were taught to be. You m-must try to forgive them. Baby cuckoos can't unlearn their bad habits. But we should try to, and because what you learn as a ch-child you will pass on to people around you, from now on this house is going to be a house of happiness. From this evening on every single one of us is going to consider other people's feelings. Georgia Byng
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When he left us, he stole all the words. Alex George
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Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don't know which place to long for. Ann Druyan
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Tell a child, that he will soon be homeless; he will slowly detach from the world. Tell that same child that he is now homeless, he will abandon all foundations. Tell the child he has a home again, he may return to Earth from his travels, but he will never want to see this world again. Unknown
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The last time she had seen him in the flesh, all the vital force of his life stripped away, his sharpened face had confronted her with such a fearful fixed finality of sightless indifference that she had been frozen in mortal terror, engulfed by abysmal despair. After all the years of unfailing support, his huge, inhuman, deaf, blind inaccessibility was horrifying. He had not kept his promise. He had abandoned her, left her to suffer alone. . Anna Kavan
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I remember his eyes. They are just like mine. Every time I look in the mirror I see him. I try not to look at my self too much. Unknown
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I think there were times when I was so afraid of losing you that I forgot I even had you at all. Ashly Lorenzana
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Kavita’s arms are still outstretched, but they hold nothing. After the metal gate clangs shut behind them, Kavita can still hear Usha’s piercing wail echoing inside. Shilpi Somaya Gowda
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He tried not to cry as he wondered if he would ever have a home again. KayeC Jones
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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. Christine Celis
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Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path. Ralph Waldo Emerson
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...in addition to feeling sick and tired and feverish and nauseated, I also felt forgotten. And there was no easy cure for that. Sarah Thebarge
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She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream... Joseph Conrad
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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. Tennessee Williams
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Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes. Phoebe Stone
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When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life. Alexandra Katehakis
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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? Yuuki Obata
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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.. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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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 less than we deserve because we don’t believe we deserve better. We may become desperate and cling as if a particular person was our last chance at love. We may become defensive and push people away. We may withdraw or constantly overreact. While growing up, many of us did not receive the unconditional love we deserved. Many of us were abandoned or neglected by important people in our life. We may have concluded that the reason we weren’t loved was because we were unlovable. Blaming ourselves is an understandable reaction, but an inappropriate one. If others couldn’t love us, or love us in ways that worked, that’s not our fault. In recovery, we’re learning to separate ourselves from the behavior of others. And we’re learning to take responsibility for our healing, regardless of the people around us. Just as we may have believed that we’re unlovable, we can become skilled at practicing the belief that we are lovable. This new belief will improve the quality of our relationships. It will improve our most important relationship: our relationship with our self. We will be able to let others love us and become open to the love and friendship we deserve. Today, help me be aware of and release any self-defeating beliefs I have about being unlovable. Help me begin, today, to tell myself that I am lovable. Help me practice this belief until it gets into my core and manifests itself in my relationships. Melody Beattie
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I shall not be defined by what I have suffered but how I have endured them. Donna Lynn Hope
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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? . Anne Ursu
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...in January, everything seems desolate. The Moon ascends to cold heights - and I, a ragged sky filled with dark kisses...lie abandoned by you... John Geddes
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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. Madhu Vajpayee
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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. Christina Enevoldsen
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They should love you, just as you are. Parents should love their kids, right?" "You'd think so. N.R. Walker
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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. Amy Gentry
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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. . Unknown
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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 Kami Garcia
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For those he has ignored, he allows them this. He allows them God, their only ally. Places to worship, but no one to teach. Greg Rucka
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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. Terry Tempest Williams
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Everything you need comes into focus when you abandon the unneeded. Bryant McGill
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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. Sarah Addison Allen
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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. Rosamund Lupton
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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. Kenny Guinn
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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. Flora Rheta Schreiber
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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. Alice Miller
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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. Carolyn Spring
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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 a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence. Pete Walker
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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. Arthur Nersesian
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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! Sarah E. Olson
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I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon. JeanPaul Sartre
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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. Garth Risk Hallberg
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Turning your back on nothing and walking away is not disloyal, it's self respect. Unknown
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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. Terry Tempest Williams
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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 sunburn. I spent so many nights carving your body into pillows, I can promise you nothing feels like sleeping with your arm around me and your breath in my ear. Still, it’s comforting to know we sleep under the same moon, even if she’s so much older when she gets to me. I like to imagine she’s seen you sleeping and wants me to know you’re doing well. Clementine Von Radics
80
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 the awful feelings of overwhelming fear, self-hate, hopelessness and self-disgust that were part and parcel of their original childhood abandonment. Pete Walker
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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. . Christina Enevoldsen
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Abandoning civil society will leave the enemy in control, not by victory but by default. Mike Klepper
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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. Cynthia DAprix Sweeney
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Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you. Ann Douglas
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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. Marnie Grundman
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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. Lena Dunham
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And so the spirits just gazed at us with eyes milked dry of care. NoViolet Bulawayo
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When you give everything, you have nothing to lose. Kate McGahan
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We lived depravityand called it truth, silencingour dreaming, andour love, discardingthings holy. John Daniel Thieme