Loss Quotes

A healing heart has no time frame.

~ Nikki Rowe

People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.

~ Mary Renault

The bereaved need more than just the space to grieve the loss. They also need the space to grieve the transition.

~ Lynda Cheldelin Fell

Bill Hodges is her touchstone, the way she measures her ability to interact with the world. Which is only another way of saying that he is the way she measures her sanity. Trying to imagine her life with him gone is like standing on top of a skyscraper and looking at the sidewalk sixty stories below.

~ Stephen King

And then our Mum and Dad were in love and they were truly dry-stone strong and durable and people speak of ease and joy and spontaneity and the fact that their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us.

~ Max Porter

Death had marked his family with unbreakable black halos, until only two remained.

~ R. W. Patterson

I do not know where I am going or what I will do when I get there. I know only that to put one foot in front of the other, moves me on, away from you to a place, where I do not want to be.

~ Jane Yolen

from Taking Your Clothes to the Salvation Army:Okay, so strangers will be grateful for this, will wear the socks to keep their feet warm, blow their noses in your handkerchiefs, pull up the shorts, tuck in the size large shirts (too small for our boys, too big for our daughter), and bits of you will be out there, engaging in a life you no longer have.

~ Jane Yolen

At first I thought he was laughing because his shoulders were shaking, but then he put his palms on his eyes and I realized he was crying. It was the quietest crying I've ever heard. Like a whisper. I was going to go over to him, but then I thought maybe he was whisper-crying because he didn't want me or anyone else to hear him.

~ R.j. Palacio

Tears are God's gift to us. Our holy water. They heal us as they flow.

~ Rita Schiano

I watched something vanish, as if I was in a dream from which I couldn't wake.

~ Mu Xin

Killing me will not end your grief. It will only create more of it.

~ Elizabeth Carlton

The effects of loss are acute, and unique to each individual. Not everyone mourns in the same way, but everyone mourns.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than that young man on the battlefield.

~ Paul Kearney

And what will bow your shoulders downwill be the vicious and worthless company with whom you will fall into this abyss.

~ Dante Alighieri

This is the context in which the story must be understood—as one incident in human history, an incident in certain ways and to certain people important, but only one incident. God is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

Taking your language into my soul, feeling it separate from sentences to words burning with flight, ‘til all I have left are meaningless letters pushing fire through my veins. Words can draw blood if you’re very, very careful. - Broken Places

~ Rachel Thompson

You used words, discarding them meaninglessly, without thinking, whereas I thought they held meaning. I found what you will never see: that my love resides on the other side of words. - Broken Places

~ Rachel Thompson

I’ve traveled this road for many decades and I still don’t know how to go. I am a wanderer, traversing mountains of time. There is no fault, only fault lines that tremor and quake, barring me, no warning. Aftershocks. -Broken Places

~ Rachel Thompson

At the graveyard there was no hope, so there was nothing to lose and no chance for disappointment.

~ Calista Lynne

The inscription on his gravestone had felt so wholly insufficient the moment she saw it. Just a name and dates, carved by machine. Just the inadequate and impersonal. Loving Father and Husband, like every other headstone there, whether it was true or not. This was the tasteful way to do it, she knew, even though it showed none of the true shape of the man

~ Stuart Nadler

On the positive side, a strong sense of comradely loyalty triggers genuine affection and friendship. On the negative side, it may strengthen contempt for the lives of opponents and, of course, the loss of a comrade may be followed by even greater brutality in battle.

~ Nel Noddings

It was only one man who had gone, but it felt like forever, something so permanent and unstoppable that it blasted her. If she were a tree, she would drop all her leaves.

~ Jenny Downham

What was wrong with her? Why did things like this keep happening to her? Love wasn't supposed to hurt, yet it felt like all she knew when it came to love was pain. Every time she opened her heart, she just got burned. Or, in this case, frozen. And she was getting sick and tired of it.

~ Elizabeth Rudnick

That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem's side of the closet, which he has still not emptied. Here are Willem's shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem's arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

The idea that a loss will get easier as time passes, is complete bullshit. It doesn’t get easier; you just learn to function while balancing the large burden on your shoulders.

~ S.d. Hendrickson

The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There's little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?

~ Helen Macdonald

I do not want to eat or drink, or i will lose the taste of you in my mouth

~ Jandy Nelson

The problem with love is this: It dies. And when it does, you die with it.

~ Apollo Blake

Then you know. You know what it's like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them.

~ Monica Hesse

Letting her go wasn't a choice because he would never let her go, she was taken away from him.

~ Mrinalini Mitra

With time one ages, and with age one comes closer to their end. With time one builds a family, a house, a name and with age one learns to live without them.

~ Mrinalini Mitra

We put our lives on hold for people who so easily forget about us.

~ Trevor Driggers

But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.

~ Monica Hesse

What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?

~ Yann Martel

The world went on. People left and people died and people went to memorial services and put orange blocks of cheese into their purses. People confessed to you that they were hungry all the time. And then you got up in the morning and pretended that none of it had happened.

~ Kate Dicamillo

There were many tears, many unsure times, many troubled moments. The fun memories were only a few, but even so, those memories will shine bright like stardust, and continue to shine on in my heart.

~ Mika Yamamori

Because Dad told you he'd be here forever. Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.

~ Kwame Alexander

When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Sometimes the worst failures in our lives turn out to be for the best. Sometimes our path leads through darkness, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't walk it. Sometimes our path leads to loss. But that doesn't mean we've gone astray.

~ Anne Elisabeth Stengl