Loss Quotes

Sometimes people get taken away from you whether you want it or not. And sometimes that hurts so much, it might be easier to forget.

~ Cassandra Clare

All the sorrows of life are bearable if only we can convert them into a story.

~ Izak Dinesen

I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy, but he rarely verbalized complaints while courageously challenging his archenemy. He met pain and physical decline with 600-calorie workouts; he discarded anxieties somewhere along innumerable running trails; he faced death by running through life at full stride.

~ Brent Green

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth.

~ Brent Green

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

~ Ariel Levy

Those of us who receive the blessing of a long life will also need to understand and manage grief and loss many times throughout our lives. Grief will come again, and again. Loss is a requisite part of the aging process and the human experience.

~ Brent Green

I’m learning geography is about lossand so I keep moving

~ Paul Guest

Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering.

~ Brent Green

Death and parting are the same.

~ Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf

You know that old cliché about how millions of deaths being a statistic, while the loss of just one life is a tragedy? If that's true, what is it when you lose something that never even had a chance to be born? I've had a lot of relationships in my time, platonic or otherwise, but the ones I think about most are those that never quite made it to term. The dashing first date who didn't call you back. The lady on the train you had that amazing conversation with but never saw again. The cool neighbor kid you met the first time a week before he moved away. I guess I'm just haunted by all that potential energy. One moment, the universe presents you with this amazing opportunity for new possibilities and then...

~ Brian K. Vaughan

Learning kindness late in life was a kind of torture. The pain often came from the past, form kindnesses withheld. The knife was particularly sharp when those who most deserved your kindness were long gone. And unless you wanted to die of sorrow, you had to give this unspent kindness to those you loved less.

~ Victor Lodato

I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.

~ James Robertson

How astounding that the largest thing he'd ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic.

~ Julie Orringer

Life becomes involuntary repetitive when you suffer from short term memory loss.

~ Steven Magee

The only people in the whole world that Salim loved had been killed by the virus that traveled to America in his own blood.

~ Bobby Adair

I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.

~ Emma Cline

No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun.

~ Jojo Moyes

And now it's been half a winter since Harry vanished, and I can finally rest my thoughts. I ought to feel relief. Of this I'm sure. But do you know what it's like to hold proof of the last heartache you'll ever know in your own raw hands? I hadn't known, either, not until Gus delivered Harry's red hat yesterday morning, a cork bobber sewed on where the pompom should've been.

~ Peter Geye

Healing is not about moving on or “getting over it,” it’s about learning to make peace with our pain and finding purpose in our lives again.

~ Shirley Kamisky

To abandon the child ‘within’ means that the adult ‘without’ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle.

~ Shelly King

You'd be surprised how little voice you have when you lose everything.

~ Alexandra Bracken

Missing someone is the worst form of torture because it never goes away no matter where you are or what you do with your life. When a person is gone and all you have of them is a fuzzy recollection of what it was like to hear your phone buzz with texts from them, the joy you experienced while in their company, that instance when the bond you shared shattered, you long for all that was lost and could’ve been gained. You have memories and nothing more. And no matter how much times passes, you still feel the ache of their absence whenever they rise into your thoughts. Torture.

~ Caroline George

I know it sounds so simple but Love Is All There Is.

~ Kate Mcgahan

He was a man built to yearn for what he could not have.

~ Anne Perry

often enough, we owe our good fortune to someone else’s loss.

~ Deb Caletti

If you haven’t figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this.

~ C.s. Lewis

As Tom wandered back to Mrs Mewett’s, he thought about the little relics at the lighthouse – Docherty’s knitting, his wife’s jar of humbugs that sat untouched in the pantry. Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief. It didn’t take a war to push you over that edge.

~ M. L. Stedman

Tom thought back to the imposing, empty house: to the silence that deadened every room with a subtly different pitch; to the kitchen smelling of carbolic, kept spotless by a long line of housekeepers. He remembered that dreaded smell of Lux flakes, and his distress as he saw the handkerchief, washed and starched by Mrs Someone-or-other, who had discovered it in the pocket of his shorts and laundered it as a matter of course, obliterating his mother’s smell. He had searched the house for some corner, some cupboard which could bring back that blurry sweetness of her. But even in what had been her bedroom, there was only polish, and mothballs, as though her ghost had finally been exorcised.

~ M. L. Stedman

As I load my shirt into the washer for the night, I daydream about making a sign and hanging it around my neck. It could read, I MISS CHARLIE KHAN.As I drive home, I picture other signs- one for everyone who has a secret. Bill Coro's would say, I CAN'T READ, BUT I CAN THROW A FOOTBALL. Me. Shunk's would read, I WISH I COULD TOSS YOU ALL ON AN ISLAND BY YOURSELVES. Dad's would read, I HATE MYSELF FOR NO GOOD REASON.

~ A.s. King

As I drive home, I picture other signs- one for everyone who has a secret. Bill Corso's would say, I CAN'T READ, BUT I CAN THROW A FOOTBALL. Mr. Shunk's would read, I WISH I COULD TOSS YOU ALL ON AN ISLAND BY YOURSELVES. Dad's would read, I HATE MYSELF FOR NO GOOD REASON.My Idea grows.

~ A.s. King

The truest form of love is where you are able to put your own needs aside to do what is best for the one you love. If you could know where I am now and if you love as you say you do, you would never ever wish me back from the love and the comfort and the bliss of where I am and where I wait for you.

~ Kate Mcgahan

John Donne's 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning' concerns a sea voyage, and uses the image of a circle as an antidote to the abyss of loss and separation. He pictures the invisible but precious bonds which link carer and cared-for, lover and beloved in an attachment relationship as slender threads of gold.

~ Jeremy Holmes

I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.

~ Lawrence Hill

COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!”In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

...she did remember on time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.

~ Stephen King

But forever was a useless term, relevant only for the dead.

~ K. Martin Beckner

I stand, and wait among the sea foam. I swim in my own tears-I sing without my voice. I do not reach for higher ground, because I have lapped in the churning waters.

~ Meredith T. Taylor