Loss Quotes

What is deeply felt is never lost.

~ Marty Rubin

All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death is the key to the gate that bars memory.

~ Diana Gabaldon

And as all of us know, it does not matter if the ending has been predetermined, or the demise inevitable, or otherwise on time, or even long overdue. For those who love or even simply fondly know a life; for those who have touched one existence with their own, helping to mould it as it does the same to them, goodbye will always and forever come much, much, much too soon.

~ Emma Rose Kraus

He entered the city asked a blind man if he had ever heard the name Enkidu, and the old man shrugged and shook his head, then turned away, as if to say, ‘It is impossible to keep the names of friends whom we have lost

~ Herbert Mason

God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.


~ Sara Sheridan

What amazes me most is that we, as a people, have shared our collective story of being thrown out of our homeland, Palestine, with each other and with many others- actually we have bored the world with this collective story- but somehow the individual Palestinian shies away, or perhaps is too afraid, to share the very personal story of being thrown out of her or his home, living room, or bedroom. These personal stories are seldom told, not even to our own children, perhaps not even to ourselves. I guess the wound remains open.

~ Suad Amiry

There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds.

~ Jandy Nelson

She said that that was the disadvantage of bringing creatures into the house: one grew used to them, and then, one had the upset of their loss.

~ Sarah Waters

There’s a lamentation in the flutter of your lash.

~ Laura A. Lord

To lose someone after you’ve loved them was tougher than losing them when you’ve never even met them.

~ Diyar Harraz

And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.

~ Raymond Carver

Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don't get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you've missed it.

~ Jonathan Stroud

Tomorrow camewith the illusion of todayeven more fleeting than yesterdayit camelike it always comesand wentlike it’s always gonelike a favorite song in its final secondsTomorrow came and leftleaving nothingnothing...but a familiarlingeringsense of loss behind.

~ Sanober Khan

most of the timesit’s the hardest to saywhat I love moreyouor your memory.

~ Sanober Khan

No one else was as close and as open, No one else so boiled my blood, Even he, who consigned me to torment, Even he, who caressed and forgot.

~ Anna Akhmatova

That's my fault, of course, because I behaved stupidly, like a child, because I didn't like feeling rejected. I need to learn to lose a little better.

~ Paula Hawkins

I sit there on the floor with the picture in front of me and think about how things get broken all the time by accident, and how sometimes you just don't get round to getting them fixed.

~ Paula Hawkins

Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me.Even as I hold youI am letting go.

~ Alice Walker

I tell you of loss, my child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours. When you should happen to cry, then cry, knowing that just as easily you will laugh again and cry again. Your feelings will enter the currents of your core and there they shall remain

~ Thanhha Lai

Our absence is what remains of us.

~ Catherine O'flynn

When I wear her clothes, I just feel safer, like she's whispering in my ear.

~ Jandy Nelson

My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss...

~ E. Lockhart

Enjoy your life, the time you have now, because time cannot be found only lost.

~ Marty Rubin

When you don't have something anymore, you learn to live without it. That's what my dad told me that first night after he found me sleeping inside a closet underneath a pile of my mom's clothes. All the different smells of her were still there and the memories were alive even if she wasn't. I looked up into his face and wondered why would I ever want to learn to live without her? That felt like she really would be gone forever, and I wanted to limp on the broken piece of me so I could feel her there all the time.

~ Alan Silberberg

im in love with you and im not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

~ John Green

I'm in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I've been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the branches with my pen, allowing my heart to break in private.

~ Jandy Nelson

Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.

~ C.s. Lewis

I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, our soul mates, our friends etc.) that it will not bother us that we will not feel. But see that's suppression. It will bother us somewhere deep inside. So, love someone. Hold them tight. Don't fear the loss. Fear the part of being too afraid to love someone. Love Everyone. It's inevitable: we all die. Thats the ugly part of life. But Love and being alive is so beautiful and so strong that the love, the memories stay even in death. Life is love, life is being alive to feel pain. The love the beautiful love always remains. Love. Life. Joy. Peace

~ Jill Telford

Imagine going a long time without seeing someone you love. Then after months or years getting the moment to see them and catch up. I think that's what death is like. Going a long time and missing them a lot, more and more each day. No matter how many years go by you miss them just as much as the first day they left. I miss my mom. Its been years. Its easier to manage but I miss her more and more. But I often think of the moment we will meet again and catch up again. In living life going a long time not seeing someone is tough then catching up right where you left off BUT imagine in death how powerful the feeling to see them again must be. Death is getting the chance to catch up and see them again. Experiencing the butterflies and that special high that is felt all over your body. Do not fear death. Embrace it as you do life. In life, love hard! Life moves fast. For when your time comes you have a chance to love hard again and catch up with those that left, those you've missed and those that missed you. Someone is there counting the days to seeing you again. Some you may not expect or some you've missed just as much. Don't fear what you think you're leaving behind. Don't fear at all. For what you leave is temporary, the living will too join you as you wait for them. And, that moment to catch up is worth the wait. You will pick up right where you left off as if time did not pass.

~ Jill Telford

If Luce had to rank the worst moments of his existence, Abaddon's betrayal would be up there with the day he was cast into the pit by his own brother.Neither came close to the sting of losing Serah, though.

~ J.m. Darhower

The value you get does not depend on what you have, but how much of it you bring to the market place. You don’t get paid when you keep your gifts at home and go to the market empty handed!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

The Luna-Ganymede Race went down in history, and the magnetic sail went down to the fusion thruster. Terranova should never have taken the bet, but it was a matter of pride - and prive loves loss above surrender.

~ Michael Flynn

Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

~ Euripides

I never thought that freedom would feel so much like grief.

~ Rosamund Hodge

Chuang-tzu once told a story about two persons who both lost a sheep. One person got very depressed and lost himself in drinking, sex, and gambling to try to forget this misfortune. The other person decided that this would be an excellent chance for him to study the classics and quietly observe the subtleties of nature. Both men experience the same misfortune, but one man lost himself because he was too attached to the experience of loss, while the other found himself because he was able to let go of gain and loss.

~ Liezi

The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

~ Gretel Ehrlich

He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.

~ Dean Koontz

But thou art with us, with us in the past,The present, with us in the times to come.There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,No languor, no dejection, no dismay,No absence scarcely can there be, for thoseWho love as we do. Speed thee well!

~ William Wordsworth

...the nostalgia for things that weren't yet lost.

~ Juan Gabriel Vásquez