Loss Quotes

And then I got to thinking about how, if someone met me for the first time now, they would need to know about Uncle Ed and my parents in order to understand me. Sometimes it feels as though I’m defined by all the people I’ve lost , like one of those negative-space pictures, where what’s not there is just as important as what is.

~ Claire Wong

Whether the judge all those years ago agreed that Jenny had no right to what she wished, or whether her plainspoken grief, which she shouted out in silence from her eyes, moved him, or disturbed him, or confused him, doesn't matter. He whispered, 'Life.' And so she lived. Is living still. Will go on living, to the end of that whisper.

~ Emily Ruskovich

The journey across the landscape of loss to the inner self takes courage and persistence. It is a risky venture, with lots of false trails and humanising errors. It requires gentleness to know your limits, yet willingness to apply pressure in the direction of growth. It is a journey that is not cost-free, nor is it ever finished. But, especially in the pitch darkness, it is a journey on which there is always hope.

~ Dr Brian Babington

When all you have is the memory of a thing, all you can think about is how the thing is gone.

~ Nathan Hill

Today’s ashes are tomorrow’s soil.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Yes, you are right. I lost my home, my mother, my identity. I lost it. Not you, Inspector Imandar. I did. They I don't understand, what did you lose? What did you lose that you hate them so much?

~ Sanchit Gupta

They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

~ Edith Wharton

Sinto que há uma estranha eternidade naquilo que amámos e foi destruído.(I feel that there lies a strange eternity in that which we loved but has been destroyed.)

~ Al Berto

You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since--on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God Bless you, God forgive you!

~ Charles Dickens

There is only one thing worse than losing the one you love, and that is losing them without knowing why. If you are a dog, then your master is like a god to you, and the pain of losing him is greater still.

~ Louis De Bernières

During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope material, finding comfort in the stability that's created from decay.

~ Miriam Toews

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.

~ Virginia Heffernan

We have…Settled into a region called “don’t ask don’t tell” and it is hard, i imagine for people who have not experienced this to understand the weight of silence and how the absence of language can feel like a death

~ Daisy Hernandez

When he left us, he stole all the words.

~ Alex George

Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don't know which place to long for.

~ Ann Druyan

To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There’s no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.

~ Sofia Samatar

I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.

~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

And in that vastness, it felt like every memory existed only to disappear one day.

~ Vatsal Surti

He was still so very young. Faeries—true faeries, not their changeling throwaways—live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it’s over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He’d never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.But he didn’t. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him.

~ Seanan Mcguire

My lord was never sane, but he was my love, once. He always will be, somewhere. Wherever it is that the once upon a times go when they die.

~ Seanan Mcguire

When's something difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder- if not impossible- to lose.

~ Sarah Dessen

Which is why we have now added a vow to our friendship that we will never ever Do You Want to Build a Snowman? each other. That at we will always talk things out and never allow miscommunication to derail our relationship. But the whole conversation made me think about times in my life when I've felt that way, like I've been dropped with no sign that it was about to happen. And I think Gulley is right- it's the worst feeling in the world because it leaves you feeling completely helpless.

~ Melanie Shankle

We treat what’s lost, what could have never been, what we could have never dreamed of, again. We treat it like heirlooms for it is so precious. For we know it can be lost, again.

~ Kevin Focke

This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.

~ Salman Rushdie

Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death.

~ Val Uchendu

The feeling of abandonment overwhelmed me as I realised that no one had waited, or cared where I was.

~ Emily Williams

Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.

~ Jodi Picoult

I hate the way the world feels when love is gone

~ Corey Ann Haydu

Once I was in the cold dim room, without furniture or carpet or rugs, only a dollhouse that wasn't as wonderful as the original, I opened the tall and narrow closet door and began my ascent up the steep and narrow stairs. On my way to the attic.On my way to where I'd find my Christopher, again...

~ V.c. Andrews

Lost love belongs in a three-minute song, pullling back feelings from a time when they came unbidden, recalling the infatuation, the walking on sunshine that cannot last and the pain of its loss, whether through parting or the passage of time, reminding us that we are emotional beings

~ Graeme Simsion

Death always feels far away from life, until it isn’t.

~ Corey Ann Haydu

Everyone else’s Minute of remembering is over, but ours stretches on and on. It doesn’tend.

~ Corey Ann Haydu

This is another awful truth of losing people you love: everyone needs something different. And the needs almost never match up.

~ Corey Ann Haydu

Sleep comes, no matter how deep the sadness cuts. It’s like a gift from the universe.

~ Corey Ann Haydu

What do you live for when everyone and everything you love is gone? Do you keep going, keep stumbling through the dark, or do you find something new to cherish? Maybe neither. Maybe you walk silently and ignore the blows time takes on your heart.

~ Courtney M. Privett

There are people that have had worse happen to them. All those people that died in the hotel bombing? All those that were maimed and left orphaned?

~ Sonal Panse

I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind.... Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child? And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way, You don't. Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.p112-13

~ Brian Doyle

Their world seemed made of little losses. she was always having to say goodbye, part with something. A brilliant sunset. A blossom. A sweet feeling.

~ Laura Frantz

Abelard to Heloise – Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart – it is the best advice I can give, for the remembrance of a person we have loved guiltily can not be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in the way of virtue.

~ Emily Williams

Sometimes you're going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there's nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human.

~ Heidi Priebe