Quotes by Journalists - Page 154

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
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 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
Loss is a part of life, that doesn't make it easy... that makes it inevitable...
Marcus Harrison Green
Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It’s not so much, what’s the point? It’s more like, what’s the difference?
Mitch Albom
Look up, greet sparks of fire with salted eyes,For he’s a burning atmospheric sigh:One blaze of liquid flame on midnight sky,Soft orbital decay, and last goodbye.
Alan James Roll
the heart aches through nights—the broken places of neglect
John Geddes
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A Certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
Joan Didion
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
I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
Djuna Barnes
Heartache, guilt, loss, grief, these things, too, are monsters.
Chelsey Philpot
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
Anne Roiphe
How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?
Howard Jacobson
Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.
Peter Heller
You can't undo loss. You can't unmake a mistake. (What The Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth?)
Gayle Forman
It is the death of hope that comes as the greatest relief
Jojo Moyes
...the nostalgia for things that weren't yet lost.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
I barely even know how I didn't feel. I didn't feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I did't even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn't feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn't feel like talking to someone who would understand.
Rivka Galchen
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
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
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
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
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
Then you know. You know what it's like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them.
Monica Hesse
But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.
Monica Hesse
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
...hope nourishes while loss empties a person out," he said.... "Lila, my love, my love,...lay down your weapons. Don't punish us because I told myself a different story than the one you told yourself.
Anat Talshir
A lie doesn't become dangerous only with exposure; it is toxic, however well buried.
Decca Aitkenhead
No matter where you live, you have the memory of something you used to eat that is no longer a part of your diet - something your grandmother used to make, something a small shop used to carry. Something we have lost. This extinction is a process; it happens one meal at a time.
Preeti Simran Sethi
i smile. things taken for granted have a way of catching you offguard when you least expect it, and then you're taken by what the portuguese calls saudade, a sense of longing for something, someone not there anymore.
Yeow Kai Chai
Loss was a night that never ended.
Carsten Jensen
We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.
Virginia Heffernan
We have…Settled into a region called “don’t ask don’t tell” and it is hard, i imagine for people who have not experienced this to understand the weight of silence and how the absence of language can feel like a death
Daisy Hernandez
But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue
Ariel Levy
No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun.
Jojo Moyes
She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker and she starts writing on the dozen or so balloons, one for each member of our family who died. She doesn't think she can write well and asks me not to read her notes.She likes to think they'll soar all the way to heaven. I think she knows they end up tangled in power lines or deflated in a pile of orange leaves in someone's backyard miles away, but I can never bring myself to say that to her. I've often wondered what they must think, those people who find our balloons. I've wondered if they read the messages and understand what they mean.I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring toward the sun until I began to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.
Kenny Porpora
I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring towards the sun until I begin to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.
Kenny Porpora
My chips are all cashed out. There's nothing to lose. Or maybe I've already lost it and found it, and whatever else there might be to lose...
Gayle Forman
..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
José Saramago
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Lionel Shriver
I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine
Albert Camus
There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.
Norah Vincent
How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another?
Gayle Forman
We've all lost something along the way.
Po Bronson
It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.
Lev Grossman
I want to be two people at once. One runs away.
Peter Heller
Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
Mitch Albom
Losing me will hurt; it will be the kind of pain that won't feel real at first, and when it does, it will take her breath away.
Gayle Forman
...when you hate someone so much, a part of you wants desperately to forgive them. But you can't decide if it's because you really want, or if you just want to stop hating. I still don't know if forgiveness is generous or selfish. Maybe both.
Miguel Syjuco
I readily admit that I'm not, and have never been, big on forgiving. That doesn't mean I will seek revenge - It just means I don't forgive.
Karen E. Quinones Miller
...it's easy to express romantic love - harder to manage daily love - to forgive failings close to feelings - to divide self from soul...
John Geddes
...you either forgive a lover for abandoning you or you forgive God for taking them - either way you have to forgive...
John Geddes
...the best way to forgive someone is to enter into their sufferings ...
John Geddes
It's not just other people we need to forgive, Mitch. " He finally whispered, "We also need to forgive ourselves.
Mitch Albom
Dogs, for a reason that can only be described as divine, have the ability to forgive, let go of the past, and live each day joyously. It’s something the rest of us strive for.
Jennifer Skiff
Cultivo una rosa blanca,En julio como en enero,Para el amigo sinceroQue me da su mano franca.Y para el cruel que me arrancaEl corazon con que vivo,Cardo ni oruga cultivoCultivo una rosa blanca.I have a white rose to tendIn July as in January;I give it to the true friendWho offers his frank hand to me.And to the cruel one whose blowsBreak the heart by which I live,Thistle nor thorn do I give:For him, too, I have a white rose.
José Martí
One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged.
Heinrich Heine
The Bishop blessed him and helped him to his feet."May God have mercy on you," he said. And erased him from his heart.
Gabriel García Márquez