Loss Quotes

The coach who goes home and doesn't think about the game he just lost is bound to repeat his mistakes.

~ Keith Cooper

Why do we as humans always tend to remember the worse things about people? We may know someone for many years, know them as vibrant and healthy, yet when they fall ill and pass away, we can only picture them at their sickest, as though they were born and lived their whole lives wearing a death mask.

~ K. Martin Beckner

And in an apartment on the other side of town, everyone wakes up with a start when the hound in the first-floor flat, without any warning, starts howling. Louder and more heartrendingly than anything they have ever heard coming out of the primal depths of any animal. As if it is singing with the sorrow and yearning of an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. It howls for hours, all through the night, until dawn. And when the morning light seeps into the hospital room, Elsa wakes up in Granny's arms. But Granny is still in Miamas.

~ Fredrik Backman

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

~ Meghan O'rourke

..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

~ José Saramago

Farewell to thee! but not farewellTo all my fondest thoughts of thee:Within my heart they still shall dwell,And they shall cheer and comfort me.

~ Anne Brontë

The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.

~ Banana Yoshimoto

I’m still pretty sick about what I’ve lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I’m not the best sleeper.

~ Nick Hornby

Sunlight’s warmth on my face awoke me in the morning. I didn’t remember falling asleep or how I came to be in my own bed. But I did recall nightmares. Awful nightmares featuring Gwen.I turned my head to stare out an open window where the sun shone in full splendor, bleaching a clear sky enough to tell it was going to be a beautiful spring day. The air smelled of rain from overnight showers, mixed with a strong floral scent. A large lilac bush outside was responsible for the perfume. I breathed in the clean and fragrant air. My eyelids fluttered, blinking at a stunning reflection of daylight off the glass. The blue beyond gave an exquisite glow to my room. All of it was an invitation to bask in a new day—an invitation I declined because none of that mattered to me. The world might as well come to a dark and ugly end. I saw no reason for beauty or life to go on so long as Gwen was lost. Rolling over in bed, I felt the vice grips wrench at my heart again as I cried myself back to sleep.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Niggard prefers mistake rather than loss.

~ Toba Beta

The reason for leaving sometimes is to return. Simply to return.

~ Yrsa Daley-Ward

Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose

~ Chuck Palahniuk

My chips are all cashed out. There's nothing to lose. Or maybe I've already lost it and found it, and whatever else there might be to lose...

~ Gayle Forman

The two brothers who sought to get their only family back, to feel her warmth, one lost his last family member and the other could never feel warmth again.The one who wanted her baby back lost chance of having one again,And the one who had a vision to see his country change became blind.

~ Hiromu Arakawa

I've lost someone, too; someone I loved. I know how you feel.- Does it get easier?Yes. But you'll never be the same again.

~ Richelle Mead

The fairest things have fleetest end,Their scent survives their close:But the rose's scent is bitternessTo her who loved the rose.

~ Francis Thompson

I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.

~ Dean Koontz

His departure gave Catherine the first experimental conviction that a loss may be sometimes a gain.

~ Jane Austen

Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in th

~ Hannah Harrington

I have seen enough, too, to know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared to those that love them; but this should give us comfort rather than sorrow, for Heaven is just, and such things teach us impressively that there is a far brighter world than this, and that the passage to it is speedy.

~ Charles Dickens

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it. They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side.

~ Heather O'neill

All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.

~ Markus Zusak

Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin's belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier 'one day' that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars.

~ Stephen M. Irwin

She always used to suspect that the price for happiness, the price for enjoying the company of a person you loved, was the steadily increasing risk of losing them, and at times, when she considered the possibility that she might lose Isabel or Clancy or, in the early days, Todd, Bernice didn't think she could stand it, didn't think she could go on living in a universe whose laws forced her to submit to such a terrible fear. Now she sees what a small price it is to pay, what staggering joy she received in return. You should be willing to pay that price for as little as a few days or hours with a person you love, she thinks, rubbing her fingers across a patch of linoleum the years have worn down to a cloudy smear.

~ Stephen Lovely

I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.

~ Karen Russell

If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I’d ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, “It’s all right,” I said, quickly. “It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later.

~ Elizabeth Berg

How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn't seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal.

~ William Kittredge

There is nothing I can give to the lost, except this: I have a responsibility I need to fathom. I have a sorrow I cannot weigh.

~ Michelle Dicinoski

He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless.

~ Christopher Isherwood

An ElegyA thousand times must we deploreThe lost will never come to life again;Even as flowing water runs away,Returning nevermore.Lady Kanin

~ Reiko Chiba

This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.

~ Jenny Erpenbeck

A man walks fast along the forecourt of the station towards a gate, moving towards a train that's about to leave. I get shivery all over as I watch the back of his head, which is about Yuan's height, with hair and a neckline just like his. My eyes tell me what my mind knows cannot be true. I follow him along seeking the one thing that would confirm him as someone else. The man turns his head slightly to talk to a train official. I can see his nose in profile. My eyes sting.

~ Dayo Forster

The man who doesn't howl at the moon when his mother dies is no man at all.

~ Marty Rubin

It was a second. A blink. The flap of a bird's wing, the moment it takes to say hello, or goodbye. So quickly that it made me think of all the insignificant seconds that we throw away. And all the seconds that we don't too. The seconds that we hold on to, that we return to... I considered the fact that all it takes is a second for life to completely change.

~ Aditi Khorana

Petra, people tell me that I will 'move on' and I can't believe it. But if it ever does happen, and I forget to feel this pressing absence of you, if I make it through a meaningless party and don't remember to hate everyone for their peaceful lives until the morning, please know that I am already sorry. I am going to try to be brave like you asked me to, but I don't have any idea yet what that means. Is it braver to allow the sadness of your leaving to spread into each of my bones until it is as big as you were to me? Or is it braver to let you drift out into what may very well be a brighter, finer place than this and be happy to think of your joy there? I hope, Petra, that I get it right.

~ Ramona Ausubel

Trees, O trees, why can't you hold on to your leaves?

~ Marty Rubin

Sing through your grief. Don't let your thoughts weigh you down.

~ Marty Rubin

You might forget,' he said. 'You can't hold on to a person when they're gone. You can't even hold on to people who are alive sometimes. I don't remember my mother's face. Not really. But I tell myself -- I'm still here. So much of who I am and what I do comes from her, I'm remembering her just by living. Every time I tilt my head or pick up a teacup the way she used to, that's a little bit of her still in the world.

~ Rose Lerner

Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overheard, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them to never turn around.

~ Kamila Shamsie

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough. If we always had smiled on the one who is gone, there would be no despair in our grief; and some sweetness would cling to our tears, reminiscent of virtues and happiness. For our recollections of veritable love—which indeed is the act of virtue containing all others—call from our eyes the same sweet, tender tears as those most beautiful hours wherein memory was born.

~ Maurice Maeterlinck