For many women today, on a personal level, the problem is not male dominance so much as male desertion.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

And no. I must not go on thinking. For the pain will never go away. You just go on and live. In the dust of desertion. Still falling where last I loved.

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.

But mayn’t desertion be a brave thing? A fine thing? To desert a thing we’ve gone beyond – to have the courage to desert it and walk right off from the dead thing to the live thing – ?

Sorry, but retirement offends me. You don’t just stop fighting in the middle of a war because your legs hurt. So why do you get to stop working in the middle of your life just because your prostate hurts? That’s desertion.

You think death is any better an excuse for desertion than any other?

Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep; it being ill for the eye‘s to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.

The desertion of Jesus, by his followers, furnishes an argument in support of the supposition that he attempted to be king of the Jews, rather than that he was a superior being.

You can’t walk away from someone you love, leave them drowning in your desertion. If love has no more meaning than that, you can keep it. I don’t want it now or ever again. Don’t want to hear the word or wear its scars.

The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail… failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

The Lord Jesus died for the ungodly. He was obedient at all costs : He bore everything, and went down into the dust of death, man‘s hatred, God’s desertion, and Satan‘s power ; we find Him there at the cost of everything. Everything that was against us was done away. By one man‘s obedience many are made righteous.

Desertion is the army‘s dirty little secret. Since the beginning of the Iraq war, more than 20,000 American soldiers have given up the fight. Most of them disappear while at home on leave, fading into a network of family and friends, and the army does not typically chase them down.

Time would not change what I was feeling–or not feeling. I’d had time, and though the ache from his desertion hadn’t disappeared, it was decreasing. My future was blurry, yes, but I was beginning to imagine a future when I would no longer miss him at all.

Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.

The fundamentalist violence is, so is it, an attempt to increase the stakes, i.e. to discourage the potential desertions by showing that defection will cost them dear, that those who adopt other values will be persecuted or even killed.

To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his misspent youth.

my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

The toddler craves independence, but he fears desertion.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

To seduce the enemies soldiers from their allegiance and encourage them to surrender is of special service, for an adversary is more hurt by desertion than by slaughter.

So she doesn’t call desertion, poverty, and hard work troubles? She’s a brave little girl, and I shall be proud to know her.