Loss Quotes

I don’t know what makes people start wanting each other any more than I know what makes it stop all of a sudden. I just know that when you lose it once, you’ll never take it for granted again

~ Sue Merrell

No. Not a death wish. Just very little left to lose.

~ Stacey Kade

Love for the beauty of the soul. I shall love you always. When the flower of life has gone, ever I shall find you. When all is lost and winter comes, I shall be your spring time. And memory fades and wilts then, I shall always find you.... I shall always find you....

~ Laurel A. Rockefeller

The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go.

~ Margaret Atwood

I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing.

~ Khushwant Singh

You don't just get over it. And it doesn't make any difference if you're supposedly a grown-up. It never goes away.

~ Sophie Kinsella

He was out to get back everything he'd lost, there was no end to his loss, this thing would drag on forever.

~ Jack Kerouac

I am so sorry for you, Leslie.' She said it like she really meant it. But not like she was completely surprised. 'And for him. Because he's lost you now.' This last part undid me. Despite her cruel criticism of me over the years, from where she sat, I was anyone and everyone's prize.

~ Leslie Morgan Steiner

If love would die along with death, this life wouldn't be so hard.

~ Andrew Vachss

One of the things that helps use cope with loss is the fact that while memories may remian, the emotions associated with them will fade like old photographs. At the same time, there is a masochistic desire to retain those feelings spurred on by the dread of losing the power they hold. Sometimes I can't think of anything more awful than simply being human.

~ James Pratt

I would do almost anything for him to kiss me; his possessive lips and eager tongue invading my mouth, even the thought sent tingles up my numb spine and lifeless body

~ Mercy Cortez

It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness—it was scarred and worn beyond repair

~ Andrea Lochen

...when the pain subsides the grief remains.

~ Jonathan Brett Kennedy

EnragedI throw myself to the ground and I scream,my best friend is gone, this world is so mean.I cry as I pound my fists on his grass,I’m very upset that our time went so fast.My heart beats faster than ever before,my tears unstoppable, I'm hurt to the core.There are no words people can say,that will ease my excruciating pain.I don’t understand why you had to go.You leaving me, we just didn’t know.I’ll make it somehow, I’ll start anew.But, there is no way I can replace you.I struggle to make it through each day,and retain my sanity in this foggy haze.The sadness and pain that I display,is because God decided to take you away.

~ Michele Lena Lucy

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think—no, you will realize—that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

~ Mary Oliver

I did not think you would be angry, Jem burst out, and it was like ice cracking across a frozen waterfall, freeing a torrent. We were engaged, Tessa. A proposal-an offer of marriage-is a promise. A promise to love and care for someone always. I did not mean to break mine to you. But it was that or die. I wanted to wait, to be married to you and live wit you for years, but that wasn't possible. I was dying too fast. I would have given it up-all of it up-to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder-a reminder of everything I am losing. The life I will not have.

~ Cassandra Clare

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.

~ Kellie Elmore

You mean to tell me you're mourning the loss of someone who never existed?

~ Taylor Nadeau

There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

~ Jodi Picoult

Perhaps, this is what love has always been, whether it is for a woman of for a cause -- the readiness to give and not ask for anything in return, the unquestioning willingness to lose everything, even if that loss is as something as precious as life itself.

~ F. Sionil José

It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul than He has created. From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free.

~ George Macdonald

I have cried over myself a hundred times this summer, she thought, I have wept over my big feet and my skinny legs and my nose, I have even cried over my stupid shoes, and now when I have true sadness there are no tears left.

~ Betsy Byars

I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.

~ Kim Addonizio

The sudden loss of her father was like living with a wound that would never heal, yet her memories of him were fading more and more every day.

~ Frank Beddor

His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.

~ Colm Tóibín

A relationship between two people is made up, for the most part, of invisible things: memories, shared experiences, hopes and fears. When one person disappears, the other is left alone, as if holding a string with no kite. Memories can do a lot to sustain you, but the invisible stuff of the relationship is lost, even as unresolved issues remain: arguments never settled, kind words never uttered, things left un-said. They become like a splinter beneath the skin-unseen, but painful nevertheless. Until they're exposed, coping with the loss is impossible.

~ David Dosa

You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever.

~ Emily Rapp

Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.

~ Elizabeth Berg

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom

~ Jodi Picoult

You are everything I have in this world Gracie

~ Marisa Oldham

And finallythe glass that contains and spills this stuff continuallywhile the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathersup empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger towardthe bathroom, some man or woman or even lostangel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?

~ Kim Addonizio

When I missed the physical body of my partner, I meditated on its parts, tossed by the waves, torn, dispersed, and deteriorated. When memories of our lives together became acute and intense, I breathed. I breathed through each wave of yearning, of regret, of guilt, of what-could-have-been. Every time I asked him, “Where are you?” A quiet voice immediately responded, “I am here. I have never left you.” I did not only lose a partner. I lost my childhood all over again. I lost my soul mate. I lost the accepting father and the gentle mother that he was to me. I lost the dream of a “normal life,” which I had tried so hard to achieve. Now I had to face my own mind.

~ Dang Nghiem

Institutions have processes favoring efficiency over loss, and process over people.

~ Bryant Mcgill

We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out.

~ Jackie French

...People are not one-dimensional. People do not live on one plane...

~ R. Elizabeth Carpenter

Paco, we are all so much more than our faults, aren’t we?

~ R. Elizabeth Carpenter

Tucked inside the moments of this great sadness - this feeling of being punctured, scrambling and stricken - were also moments of the brightest, most swollen and logic shattering happiness I've ever experienced. One moment would be a wall of happiness so tall it could not be scaled; the next felt like falling into a pit of sadness that had no bottom. I realized you could not have one without the other, that this great capacity to love and be happy can be experienced only with this great risk of having happiness taken from you - to tremble, always, on the edge of loss.

~ Emily Rapp

Take solace in that, regardless of the fact that the love you had in your mind was lost, it was fairer than any, and you can take that with you forever.

~ Taylor Nadeau