Loss Quotes

Since he died some of the colours have disappeared. I have lost the violet of seeing him, the indigo of touching him, the blue of talking to him and the green of smelling him. But I can still see some of his colours. I still have the red of the feelings in my heart, the orange of his possessions, and the yellow of our memories.Which is why it feels so confusing. He is gone, but not entirely. The white light is no longer with me, but a few of his colours remain; vibrant, illuminating. Sometimes I lose sight even of these colours. I search in the shadows, hungry for another glimpse, desperate that I may have lost them forever. This is my darkness.

~ Thomas Harding

They tell me the letters I write to you and leave here at this memorial are waking others up to the fact that there is still much pain left, after all these years, from the Vietnam War. But this I know. I would rather to have had you for 21 years, and all the pain that goes with losing you, than never to have had you at all.

~ Bernard Edelman

The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Everyone for whom I would have cried has already died.

~ Kathryn Orzech

As a young girl I was told the truth. I knew about death. I was afraid to lose but not afraid to die.

~ Kayko Tamaki

I realize in this moment that all my life I've felt that I deserve to be punished, for wanting so much, for taking so much from this world, from the people who love me.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

How many paths had I avoided in life? How many times had I been content to stop at close enough--too afraid to push ahead? Too afraid to let go?Too afraid to give up . . . control.

~ Nicole Deese

Proud houses fall into decline and great cities pass into ruin. The stories of those things are lost to forgotten languages and moth-eaten scrolls. Vine and root grapple with the rune carved in stone, and rust carries away, fleck by fleck, the great gates of iron.

~ William Timothy Murray

I don't want to tiptoe around her or him or you anymore. The only thing that's doing us making it harder for me to remember her. Sometimes i try to concentrate on her voice just so i can hear her again-The way she always said 'Hey there' when she was in a good mood,An 'Vi-o-let' when she was annoyed.For some reason, these are the easiest ones.I concentrate on them, and when i have them. I hold on to them because i don't ever want to forget how she sounded.Like it or not,She was here and now she's gone.But she doesn't have to be completely gone.

~ Jennifer Niven

When you've gone through something traumatic, when you've faced death and loss as much as we have, it's only natural that it changes your entire view of life.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

We must learn to live in this world, because we have no other choice. What we do have a choice in is how we choose to live. We can remain gray and immobile in the wake of our losses or we can open ourselves up to the world, let the sunshine in, fill our surroundings with heaps of flowers, and know that we loved someone truly and deeply.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

I am them. And they are me. All of us, we are each other. There is no such thing as good-bye.

~ Claire Bidwell Smith

She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she'd let herself love - it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them.

~ Esi Edugyan

A sword held in vengeance only leads to grief.

~ Pritesh Patil

She had a dream, quite singular, dearest to her heart.She had a dream, quite eccentric, treasured in her soul.She nurtured it, she cuddled it and kept it covered in the twinkle of her eye and waited patiently with a fond expectation.Yet in that sky wrapped in the radiance of a rainbow , all but that dream came alive.She often smiled at that solitary dream with numb tears of pallid fulfilment.

~ Debatrayee Banerjee

If you are too afraid of losing something, it means you didn’t care enough for it in the first place.

~ James Marquess

What I want to know is how you go on when you look aroundand don’t see anywhere you want to go without the only personyou can’t have.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Memories is all that you have, which help you survive the storms and struggles of your daily life after you lose someone!

~ Nikita Dudani

No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived.

~ Jojo Moyes

Had I known, I would not have left you,alone beneath those stars,on the night when I last saw you,not knowing it was the last.

~ Lang Leav

My Dad is everywhere and he is nowhere. My world tilts on a different axis, orbiting the sun of my own family- but still, I feel his warmth.

~ Elisabeth Egan

I turn my back on him as he goes,and settle myself in the parlor,and touch Ma's piano.My fingers leave sighsin the dust.

~ Karen Hesse

It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend.That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.

~ Brenna Ehrlich

it seems that man has learnednot to seenot to knowfor he's found the potof goldbut lost the rainbow...

~ Barry Decarli

Mourning is never really complete. The mappings of the old play remain in the cortex, like those mappings of the phantom limb.

~ Robert A Berezin

If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,When other petty griefs have done their spite,But in the onset come: so shall I tasteAt first the very worst of fortune’s might;And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,Compar’d with loss of thee will not seem so.

~ William Shakespeare

Liv grabbed the cookie nearest her and broke it open.“It's up to you to make your happy ending.”Liv stared at it a moment, rereading the words. Did it mean life? Because if it did, then Liv disagreed. Sometimes life was downright unfair. Bad things happened to good people.

~ Danika Stone

Politics is an alternative to war and if you're in it, you live it as such. You win some & you lose at times.

~ Mamur Mustapha

Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed.

~ Seré Prince Halverson

From my distance the loss was theoretical, and though I couldn’t have said so, I preferred it that way. I felt relieved to be so far away, because I was excused from grieving. I felt nothing but tenderness for her, but there was an emotional emancipation to being here and not there. Even though I didn’t believe in God or heaven, I could childishly go on believing that she was still around. When it happened, the specific timing of my grandmother’s death seemed like a footnote: She died just after I went away. But a lesson would persist as I formed and unformed long-distance relationships over the years. Going away could free you from feeling too much.

~ Elisabeth Eaves

There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.

~ Ashley Hay

Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn’t want to change me… Love appears to have made you less functional.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

~ John Banville

Sometimes I feel like my whole life before she died was a dream.

~ Ann Dee Ellis

I wonder now if [the gods] take from us that which we love so we must seek them, if only to scavenge for meaning in this existence.

~ Tosca Lee

Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Kell stared at her, at a loss. Was her bravado a front, or did she truly have so little to lose? But she had a life, and a life was a thing that could always be lost.

~ V.e. Schwab

There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me.

~ Bill Clegg

A word of consolation may sweetly touch the ear.Now and then a quiet songwill clear the mind of fear.A simple act of kindnesscan ease a load of care.Stories told in memorydiminish all despair.A whispered prayer of comfortdraws angel arms around.Counting blessings, great and small,helps gratitude abound.These acts, all sympathetic,will kindly play their part.But seldom do they dry the tearsshed mutely in the heart.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.

~ Joyce Maynard