Loss Quotes

Anger is the only antidote strong enough to counter grief.

~ Rauwolfia

Nora had been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them - not at all - but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos...After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain.

~ Tom Perrotta

He had never cared if his victims lived or died once he was through with them. But not her. He couldn’t allow her to die. The moment he felt that small flutter of her heart, ready to give way to his hunger, he had stopped and gazed down at her for long moments.

~ Elaine White

Loss is a part of life, that doesn't make it easy... that makes it inevitable...

~ Marcus Harrison Green

Loosers want it but only through the easy way. If action taking were like reading a story book, loosers would only love to open the picture pages

~ Israelmore Ayivor

It was only that night, dreaming forbidden dreams of Laurence and the clear attraction he had already displayed towards her, that the dream was disturbed. She woke to pain, her eyes and mouth flashing open in a wordless scream as two strong fangs pierced her neck. A body lay across hers, warm and strong as she felt the life being sucked out of her. The moment he knew she was awake, Laurence had pulled back from feeding and smiled at her with a bloody grin. ‘You are mine now, Shiloh. You may never leave this house until the day I die.’ He had warned her, planting a tormenting kiss on her lips before resuming his feed.

~ Elaine White

With Angela, everything about Damian died. His hopes, his dreams, his emotions. From that day on, Trey watched with regret, and a silent prayer to his sister, who he hoped looked down upon them. He wished that Damian would rediscover his humanity. He wished that she had died happy. And he hoped that one day, Damian would learn to live again.

~ Elaine White

She knew nothing of the massacre that went on around her, but when she released the wail of a broken hearted mother, one man heard her. The one who took her son's life.

~ Elizabeth Bourgeret

Free is he who is reputable for not being fearful of losing his reputation.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

For a full two hours, he stood at that door, a cloud of uncertainty ruling his mind. Damian felt like his heart was about to burst. Could she love him? Was it really true?

~ Elaine White

Shiloh had become far too used to it; for all that she paid him no mind, the moment his sharp fangs pierced the skin on the inside of her thigh, her head lolled back against the seat and she closed her eyes. The feeling was still delectable even now.

~ Elaine White

With a snarling face, fangs and blood red eyes, she had lunged at him and secured her mouth to his throat before he had even had time enough to scream. It had been the most terrifying moment of his life. Only two thoughts had occupied his mind; surviving to see Angela again, and the sensation of hearing his own heart beat fade away. Amelia had fed from him for what felt like hours, but that he knew couldn’t have been very long, as Angela never came to see what had become of him. He lay in the dirt, with Amelia hunched over his limp body, with the sound of his own, failing breath in his ears and the bloodthirsty sound of someone sucking out his blood.

~ Elaine White

So many things are lost in the dark. A slight misstep and we lose our footing. A quick hand in a pocket and we lose our money. A coat hanger in a womb and we lose a fetus. A swift puncture and we lose a life.

~ Pat Henshaw

There was nothing to see in the room, but his brain pulled multiple vivid memories to the forefront of his mind. Entering the house as husband and wife, with Angela holding onto his arm. The night his father died in the downstairs bedroom while he was helpless to do anything but watch from the window; an outsider. Long years of being Angela’s Peter Pan before that boy had ever existed, flitting in and out of her window, and her life. Watching the woman he loved grow old and live a life without him by night, then babysitting her killer by day. It was impossible for him to see Amelia as anything else in those early days. The days before he loved her.

~ Elaine White

As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.

~ Ben Fountain

One month flies by when you're falling love with the woman you're using for sex. Two is an eternity when the woman you love leaves you.

~ Christina Lauren

Watch people when they win, and you will learn something. But watch them when they lose, and you will learn even more.

~ Pang-Mei Natasha Chang

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.

~ Jodi Picoult

I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.

~ Cheryl Strayed

The fear of losing someone you love can turn people inside out.

~ Shannon Wiersbitzky

What is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I love to believe that such shall be our awakening from earth to heaven. My faith never wavers that each dear friend I have “lost” is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands or hear a tender word from them; but the light of faith never fades from the sky, and I take heart again, glad they are free. I cannot understand why anyone should fear death…Suppose there are a million chances against that one that my loved ones who have gone on are alive. What of it? I will take that one chance and risk mistake, rather than let any doubts sadden their souls, and find out afterward. Since there is that one chance of immortality, I will endeavor not to cast a shadow on the joy of the departed…Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel more powerfully drawn to them.

~ Helen Keller

Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and postal workers were having their worst year ever, as they were actually meeded. Food was becoming scarcer and more expensive, as was fuel for vehicles and heating. Major cities experienced riots on a regular basis, spurred on by religious fervor and want. Civilization was on the brink of collapse.

~ Mark A. Rayner

If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world.

~ Helen Keller

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy

~ Hisham Matar

As a species, tragedy dwells within us all. We push it to the back of our thoughts, but it is never so far gone that it cannot return, crashing and writhing into our souls: a rogue wave overturning a boat on a calm day. Tragedy is never more than a breath away. We hide from its certainty and go about our lives as though time can be wasted. Somewhere deep inside ourselves we know that we tell ourselves lies. We know that someday everything we love will be gone.

~ Logan Kain

they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It's amazing to me; when your mind is fixed on one thing, you forget everything. You forget to eat and drink and care. The only thing I could never forget was him.

~ Mercy Cortez

Max, for some people there are no victories, just alternate forms of losing.

~ David Niven

How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.

~ Jodi Picoult

There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey towards eternity. There was almost no chance that anyone present would ever see the departed again

~ Cole Moreton

I miss you with the very edge of my skin.It winces in absence, a giant muscle contracting.

~ Valentina Cano

Not many people understood the inherent pain of a career in heroics. Your body aches from the demands of day-to-day protection. Your mind whirs with the things you did wrong, the ways you could’ve done better, the scores of citizens you didn’t save. And when you lose someone you love, when their blood forms a puddle beneath your cheek while you watch… Your name, Watcher, becomes the cruelest agony of all.

~ Shirin Dubbin

...I’m tired of everyone looking at me with pity in their eyes. I’m tired of feeling like my heart is being ripped out of my chest every damned day. I’m tired of waking up in the morning, and then remembering...

~ A.b. Shepherd

When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.

~ Jodi Picoult

Anything said is gone as soon as it leaves my lips. Things written down at least have a chance to leave a soft echo of what had been.

~ Chris Dietzel

Treat gain and loss the same.' Don't be Intimidated. Don't make a Big Deal of anything - just accept things as they come to you.

~ Benjamin Hoff

But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

~ Jodi Picoult

But it turns out Joy is a house built from the same bricks as Sorrow. Pleasure is a poem, and it uses the same words as Pain.

~ Julio Alexi Genao

Innocence could be lost more than once after all.

~ Selena Kitt