Loss Quotes

It’s important to have a buddy like that. Somebody who’ll stop you from doing that really stupid thing you were gonna do just because you couldn’t think of anything better. -- unidentified soldier, eulogizing his dead buddy

~ Henry V. O'neil

And there was time enough--or so it seemed--for all the cherries atop all the ice-cream sundaes in all the world to fall from their frozen perches, as the heat of a treasure chest summer melted them away. Down and down into the cups of what it would all become, trusting on the ingredients, and how much love had been used to unite them.

~ Tag Cavello

Everything that falls upon the eye is an apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves & brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away...so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable...Why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe had made notable?...It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost.

~ Marilynn Robinson In Housekeeping

As the sky faded to night, her anger dissipated—but not in a healing way, just dulled, like forged iron sizzling in a cold pail of water.

~ Katherine Mcintyre

How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

~ Howard Jacobson

Sometimes falling apart is the bravest act of all

~ Sarah Hackley

Missing Alina was worse than a terminal illness. At least when you were terminal you knew the pain was going to end eventually. But there was no light at the end of my tunnel. Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would. I was going to have to walk around with a hole in my heart forever. I was going to hurt for my sister until the day I died. If you don't know what I mean or you think I'm being melodramatic, then you've never really loved anyone.

~ Karen Marie Moning

Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he id watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living? Why?

~ Carson Mccullers

There’s 6.5 billion people curled up like fists protesting death, but every breath we take has to be given back; a nine year old boy taught me that.

~ Shane L. Koyczan

I know this: there is no sense to grief. There is no pattern or shape or texture, and there are no books or stories which can lessen the pain at losing a person you have loved, and will always love. There are no rules, with loss.

~ Susan Fletcher

Since we all know for a fact that we're all going to die, why don't we all treat each other like we could lose each other at any minute?

~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

It was a tragic end to a heroic life.

~ Chris Kyle

We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

~ Anne Roiphe

Though there is much we still want, there is much we already have, and that means we have much to lose as well. It’s that potential loss that can keep us bound so tightly that we never reach our biggest dreams, because the biggest dreams require the most risk.

~ A.j. Darkholme

Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

I said out loud, Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is.Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing.Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

There is a realm in which miracles are possible and do take place. The door to this realm is the belief in all possibilities and YOU are the key.

~ Vivian Amis

Rob; you could have been someone I wanted to be with. But you’re not; you never spoke to Niall, not really. You joked and you danced, but how often did you really talk? You never even told him you loved him until it was already too late. What was he to you? A friend? A lover? Or was he just some set piece in Rob Sardan’s great story? Is that what everyone is to you? Can’t we have our own story?

~ Joel Cornah

Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Standing on the edge with my patients — abiding with them — means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.

~ Christine Montross

With the ambitions, to seize the opportunity to win is your big loss.

~ Auliq Ice

Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.

~ Tennessee Williams

I want you to forget what i told you earlier, I... I couldn’t love someone like you. I hate you. I thought it the second i saw you in the park. You were just poison! Drinking beer in the morning, quoting some stupid Tanka to me! You listening to other people talking all day just so you never have to reveal a thing about yourself! You knew who I was, I was just a kid! What were you thinking what’s wrong with you?! If I’d know who you were I wouldn’t have told you a thing about me or my dreams. You don’t think I can do it! You don’t think I’ll ever amount to anything! What is that why you didn’t say anything to me? You thought maybe you'd humor the little kid? Indulge his fantasies for a little while! Just string him along? Just say it I’ll never measure up to my dreams! You knew from the beginning you could have just admitted it! But you played along. So tell me god damn it! Tell me that little kids should run along to school! Tell me that you hate me! Say it! Come on listener say something for a change! You loser! Its because you act like that. You never say what's important! You act like it's none of your business! You've been living your whole life alone!

~ Makoto Shinkai

I ached with loss that I’d never allowed myself to feel. As if I was leaving something important behind. And that something was me.

~ A. Lynn

In the support group, the counselor had said: When you lose a loved one, you feel as if you're inside a confined space. Everyone else will seem to be careening along outside of this space. In time, you will become aware of an opening you are going to have to step through. It might be the touch of a new lover, a new job, a move--but you'll know. You will step through.

~ Jamie Quatro

If you love your dad, it’s tough when he dies. If you don’t like your dad, it’s tough when he dies. Because you lose that guy. Whatever you didn’t get, you miss. And what you did get, you miss.

~ Jimmy Iovine

Leaving yourself behind is the worst loss a person can know.

~ A. Lynn

I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.

~ Marcel Proust

My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life - and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I'm 0 for 2 and I don't get any more pitches to swing at.

~ Daisy Whitney

No, I am not all right, I want to say. Have you been to my house? Have you seen how empty it is?

~ Daisy Whitney

Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock's self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?She didn't say it out loud, though, because there wasn't a point.It isn't about saying.It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.

~ Ali Smith

Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?

~ Alice Sebold

Heartache, guilt, loss, grief, these things, too, are monsters.

~ Chelsey Philpot

What I understand now about survival is that something in you dies. You don't become a survivor intact. Survival's cost is always loss.

~ J Dylan Yates

Nothing is really lost in the World, everything is preserved.

~ Joan Ambu

Like that first kiss we will never have. Like the last kiss we will always have.

~ Dimitri Zaik

You get all these friends when just when you don't need friends anymore.

~ John Green

Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.

~ Maeve Binchy

Lost. The therapist made it sound as if the person could be found. As if death wasn’t final and irrevocable.

~ Lurlene Mcdaniel