Loss Quotes

You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.

~ Alison Bruce

Your laugh is of the sardonic kind.

~ Caius Sempronius Gracchus

Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else.

~ Stephanie Roberts

I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there’s room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future…

~ Mark Doty

We human beings don't realize how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.

~ Malala Yousafzai

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

~ M.l. Stedman

HELLO, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, how hard you hope.

~ Nathan Filer

The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

~ Roman Payne

It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it

~ Oscar Wilde

You can love someone so much… But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.

~ John Green

Power is a fickle mistress, easy to seduce, but even easier to lose. That's how it works. One moment she is your closest confidant, whispering the secrets of the universe into your ear; the next, she is your vilest oppressor—and once her ears close to your plights you are well and truly screwed.

~ Nenia Campbell

There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This is what had happened to Anna.

~ Anna Kavan

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you’re like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you’re alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin’ Christmas spirit.

~ Anna White

A day doesn't go by when I don't look at them, she said. I can't have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom--I just can't do it, I just can't run into them casually when I'm supposed to be doing something else--but I also can't last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I am alone in the house.

~ Chris Bohjalian

Every game has rules. Obey the rules, win the game; disobey the rule, lose it! The game of life has loser and winners. Play fairly and win!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

There cannot be love without loss, just like there cannot be happiness without sadness, or light without dark.

~ Markus Peterson

The God I serve is able to save us both. To give us the winning lottery ticket so all our money problems will go away. To mend our broken hearts. To bring us close to those we love. He is able. He is able. He is able.But even if He doesn’t, do not bow to bitterness. Do not fall down onto your broken pieces and let them cut you to ribbons. Even if He doesn’t do all that He is able to do, all that we wish He would do, He is good.

~ Anna White

You are still thinking like a child, talking about friendship and crap. You’ll regret it when you see one of them die in front of you.

~ Charles Lee

You may cry out tears for misplacing your money, but you got to cry out blood if you have misplaced your dreams. Sadly, you may not even know the great deal of influence you loss when you misplace your dreams, so how will you cry for such a loss?

~ Israelmore Ayivor

It began with the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her tastebuds. Without him life was so dark, and all the holiday debris only made it worse. She promised herself she wouldn't bite down.

~ Kirsty Logan

LamentFor JAmong the small graves a soft shaft of sunlight gently rainsOn a memory; etches, as a glittering finger,Golden corn field hair, ignites eyes sweet as the seas blue plains,Traces lips pink as Marys carnation tears and lingersThen is gone. Oh ancient sun above how shall I tellOf the hearts deep yearnings that the years can never quell?

~ Alan James Roll

The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn’t recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in my ear that the best times, the ones that change our lives, are woven with the thread of loss.

~ Anna White

Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible.

~ Rhonda Riley

I didn't know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters.

~ Laura Dave

This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance.

~ Phindiwe Nkosi

Nothing ever goes back on the vine.

~ Steve Weddle

Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

~ Phindiwe Nkosi

People and birds were alike. Things happened that hurt them or made their lives harder. All the time. But losing someone or something important didn't mean the end of everything. It meant you had to find a new way to do things.

~ Suzanne Goldsmith

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

~ Donna Tartt

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother.

~ Cheryl Strayed

If you keep picking at that scab on your heart, it won't heal.

~ Antonia Perdu

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

~ Cheryl Strayed

This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.

~ Ann Hood

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I work so hard for profits because my dreams are expensive.

~ Amit Kalantri

And that's what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don't want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.

~ Elizabeth Scott

Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still life, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.

~ Thomas Wolfe

Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.

~ Stephen King