“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”

— Kazuo Ishiguro

“The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven’t seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat’s sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog’s so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown.”

— Nick Flynn

“Everybody has a story. It’s like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can’t say you haven’t got them. Same goes for stories.”

— Diane Setterfield

“The problem with me is that I cannot focus when she is on my mind. I can’t. I probably will make a mistake when writing that paper and will start writing everything I feel about her-the professor will be very happy with that, I am sure. Oh well, such is my life. I guess I’ve been attempting my best to forget her for several weeks now. But even in that act of forgetting her, I am remembering her. I am recollecting her and recreating her in my mind. And that’s where everything falls apart. In remembering her, I remember her goodness. In remembering her, I remember her weaknesses and my own. In remembering her, I am remembering myself. Out of that dark cave of mine, I call myself out. And then all of the remembering starts again. I doodle, I twitch, I aim restlessly for some unseen goal. And then my thoughts drift to you.
I’ll let them stay there for now. Just for a minute.
Or two.”

— Moses Y. Mikheyev

“Let’s say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.”

— Hilary Mantel

“They haven’t spoken about it, they haven’t said what will we do when we leave here, do you want to come with me, let’s work something out, and she knows that this means they will quickly and easily drift apart, into other people’s lives, into other people’s arms in rooms like this. She is surprised that this doesn’t make her feel sad. She listens to the music, she looks around at the things people dropped when they fell asleep or went out of the room, she kisses the boy’s arm again and she feels only a kind of sweet nostalgia. She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it’s in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowah doowah doowah.”

— Jon McGregor

“It’s true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We’re all busy people,we can’t spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.”

— William Boyd

“My mom shows me her old yearbooks, and there are tons of people in there she doesn’t talk to anymore. Old boyfriends, best friends … What do you think happened to them?”
“Maybe they drifted apart.”
“That’s stupid. You don’t drift, not if someone matters to you.”
“So maybe they didn’t matter, not really.”
“Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“I’d never do that. Leave you.”
“I know. Me either.”

— Abigail Haas

“Few, in the days of early youth,
Trusted like me in love and truth.
I’ve learned sad lessons from the years;
But slowly and with many tears;
For God made me to kindly view
The world that I was passing through.
And all who tempt a trusting heart
From faith and hope to drift apart,
May they themselves be spared the pain
Of losing power to trust again!
God help us all to kindly view
The world that we are passing through!”

— Lydia Maria Francis Child

“Piece by piece,
I slowly fade away,
I slowly drift apart.”

— Five Finger Death Punch

“AT NIGHT
My bedroom,as I drift.
Every night,Jack is with me.
He lies down on his side, lengthwise on my bed,and props his head on my pillow. I mirrow his position. He places his hand over mine. I see it,but I don’t feel it.We discovered long ago that we can’t touch,even in our dreams. I am as much of a ghost to him as he is to me. We are a breath away-and a world apart-from each other.
He doesn’t know where he goes when he’s not with me.He doesn’t think he exists anymore,except for in my dreams.
I think he is right.And I tell him to hang on.I will never stop dreaming of him.
I will find him.”

— Brodi Ashton

“One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world – your little carved-out sphere – is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you’re an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you’re lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That’s when you realize that most of it – life, the relentless mechanism of existing – isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge. Even after you’re dead.”

— Lauren Oliver

“We breathe and breathe and breathe together. She takes my hand and I think how otters sleep floating on their backs in water, holding hands exactly like this, so they don’t drift apart in the night.
After a while, she picks up her fist. I do the same.
Rock/Rock
Scissors/Scissors
Rock/Rock
Paper/Paper
Scissors/Scissors
“Yes!” she cries. “We still got it, yes we do!”

— Jandy Nelson

“They got married and, as humans do, began to drift apart.”

— Julie Kagawa

“Being friends with anyone for 30 years is no easy task – people change, they drift apart, they move on.”

— Alana Stewart

“If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.”

— Bill Bryson

“Apart from them, Kitty had never been able to keep friends, not because she was disloyal in any way, she just felt that she hadn’t connected with anyone deeply since her school friends and so it was easy to drift away as life moved on, as college finished and as she found new jobs and created new friendships that lasted as long as the jobs had.”

— Cecelia Ahern

“I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“I could feel it in myself. I felt lighter, unshackled, as if something I had been carrying had fallen away … I just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals. The pronoun ‘we’ itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.”

— Jerry Spinelli

“Throughout it all, I loved her as much as I always had, and I found myself aching for those simpler times of the past. I knew what was happening, of course. As we were drifting apart, I was becoming more desperate to save what we once had shared; like a vicious circle, however, my desperation made us drift apart even further.”

— Nicholas. Sparks

“Eragon said, I have a new name for pain. What’s that? The Obliterator. Because when you’re in pain, nothing else can exist. Not thought. Not emotion. Only the drive to escape the pain. When it’s strong enough, the Obliterator strips us of everything that makes us who we are, until we’re reduced to creatures less than animals, creatures with a single desire and goal: escape. A good name, then. I’m falling apart, Saphira, like an old horse that’s plowed too many fields. Keep hold of me with your mind, or I may drift apart and forget who I am. I will never let go of you.”

— Christopher Paolini

“Time and tide. Love had its own circadian rhythms, and it was beginning to look like he and Max had missed their chance, that they’d slipped into a comfortable somnolence. Perhaps they would continue on indefinitely, but it was all too likely one of these days they were simply going to drift gently, quietly apart.”

— Josh Lanyon

“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”

— Philip Pullman

“I think most couples drift apart because of comparisons. Unfortunately, in our society a perfect match is when the man is more successful than the woman.”

— Sonam Kapoor

“When we finally meet how much do I confess? Our bond is tenuous. Frail as a drift of moonlight on open sea. Would the truth crash us apart? Some secrets can’t be kept for too long. No matter how hard you try to hide them, sooner or later, they scurry out from your cupboards, cockroaches on the run. No way to grow closer with deceit wedged between us. Should I tell or should I hide it away? Would you run away?”

— Ellen Hopkins

“We phone each other because it’s only in these long-distance calls, this groping for each other along cables of buried copper, cluttered relays, the whirling contact points of clogged selector switches, only in this probing the silence and waiting for an echo that one prolongs that first call from afar, that cry that went up when the first great crack of the continental drift yawned beneath the feet of a human couple, when the depths of the ocean opened up to separate them, while, torn precipitously apart, one on one bank and one on the other, the couple strove with their cries to stretch out a bridge of sound that might keep them together yet, cries that grew ever fainter until the roar of the waves overwhelmed all hope.”

— Italo Calvino

“But this is such a “Wheel” moment. That song rocks. The best part is where John Mayer says how our connections are permanent, how if you drift apart from someone there’s always a chance you can be part of their life again. How everything comes back around again.”

— Susane Colasanti

“[Wheel] rocks. The best part is where John Mayer says how our connections are permanent, how if you drift apart from someone there’s always a chance you can be a part of their life again. How everything comes back around again. I have a theoru that the answers to all og life’s major questions can be found in a John Mayer song.”

— Susane Colasanti

“People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”

— D. A. Carson

“I’ve seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.”

— Stephen Leacock