Abandonment

Abandonment is a subjective emotional state in which people feel undesired, left behind, insecure, or discarded. People experiencing emotional abandonment may feel at a loss, cut off from a crucial source of sustenance that has been withdrawn, either suddenly, or through a process of erosion.

Quotes

O humble and lowly Saviour, grant me the knowledge of the true Christian, and that I may willingly despise myself; let me learn the lesson so incomprehensible to the mind of man, that I must die to myself by an abandonment that shall produce true humility. ~ François Fénelon

• For many of my years — perhaps twelve — had passed away since my nineteenth, when, upon the reading of Cicero's Hortensius, I was roused to a desire for wisdom. And here I was, still postponing the abandonment of this world's happiness to devote myself to the search. For not just the finding alone, but also the bare search for it, ought to have been preferred above the treasures and kingdoms of this world; better than all bodily pleasures, though they were to be had for the taking.
  • Augustine, Confessions, A. Outler, trans. (Dover: 2002), Book 8, Chapter 7, p. 139

• ABANDON, v.t. [1.] To correct an erring friend or admonish a needy one. Of women the word abandoned is used in the sense of indiscreet. [2.] To confer the advantage of being rid of you. To recant.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

• O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!
  • Denis Diderot, quoted in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881) by Robert Green Ingersoll; The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367

• O humble and lowly Saviour, grant me the knowledge of the true Christian, and that I may willingly despise myself; let me learn the lesson so incomprehensible to the mind of man, that I must die to myself by an abandonment that shall produce true humility.
  • François Fénelon, reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 334

• Destruction did not cease with my abandonment of my realm, no more than people would cease to dream should you abandon yours.
  • Neil Gaiman, in lines for Destruction, in Sandman #48, later in the collection Brief Lives

• Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she abandon to cries and lamentations.
  • Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book VII, Section II

• Donald's problem was that the combative, rigid persona he developed in order to shield him from the terror of his early abandonment, along with his having been made to witness his father's abuse of Freddy, cut him off from real human connection.
  • Mary L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020), p. 51