Loss Quotes - Page 21

How astounding that the largest thing he'd ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic.
Julie Orringer
Life becomes involuntary repetitive when you suffer from short term memory loss.
Steven Magee
The only people in the whole world that Salim loved had been killed by the virus that traveled to America in his own blood.
Bobby Adair
I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.
Emma Cline
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
And now it's been half a winter since Harry vanished, and I can finally rest my thoughts. I ought to feel relief. Of this I'm sure. But do you know what it's like to hold proof of the last heartache you'll ever know in your own raw hands? I hadn't known, either, not until Gus delivered Harry's red hat yesterday morning, a cork bobber sewed on where the pompom should've been.
Peter Geye
Healing is not about moving on or “getting over it,” it’s about learning to make peace with our pain and finding purpose in our lives again.
Shirley Kamisky
To abandon the child ‘within’ means that the adult ‘without’ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.
Jorge Luis Borges
If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle.
Shelly King
You'd be surprised how little voice you have when you lose everything.
Alexandra Bracken
Missing someone is the worst form of torture because it never goes away no matter where you are or what you do with your life. When a person is gone and all you have of them is a fuzzy recollection of what it was like to hear your phone buzz with texts from them, the joy you experienced while in their company, that instance when the bond you shared shattered, you long for all that was lost and could’ve been gained. You have memories and nothing more. And no matter how much times passes, you still feel the ache of their absence whenever they rise into your thoughts. Torture.
Caroline George
If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I’ve assumed a pay-off, I’m only assuming a sacrifice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
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 couldn't have imagined how much more there was to lose.
Christina Baker Kline
This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?
Robert Pinsky
The feeling doesn’t always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn – they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove.
Catherine Lacey
If loss makes you doubt your belief in justice, then you never truly believed in justice at all.
Gail Simone
I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched ... Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You must understand, owing to my loss of faith in life, I had gradually, inevitably embarked upon a small world of my creation.
Lawrence G. Taylor
What should I call you? A friend, a stranger, or a lover? I remember the day you laid your eyes on me the first time. There was just something unwavering about that moment. It wasn’t peaceful or absolute. It was definite. Something that was bound to happen. It was like as if our souls were waiting for us to collide. And oh we did! We collided like meteors, giving this universe a spectacular view. From my 2 am thought that used to keep me up at night, you soon became my 2 am call. From an almost stranger to my skin, you became a part of me. But just like every collision, ours also had to end in destruction. The 2 am call soon became a 2 am thought. The thought still keeps me up at night, but not for the same reasons. From strangers to lovers and lovers to strangers again, our journey hasn’t been ordinary. Someone asked me about you today and for a moment, I didn’t know what to call you. Who are you to me now? A friend – no. Definitely not a lover. I guess, you and I – we are just strangers with memories.
Bhavya Kaushik
It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.
Rebecca Solnit
You were the colors to my monochrome life. My morning light and my midnight dream. Flawed, yet whole. You used to think that you weren’t enough – but you were enough for me. You were my first everything. My fire. My tornado. You were the eye of my storm. The moment I saw you, I knew you were going to destroy my life. But I let it happen. There was just something magical and outlandish about playing with fire that I couldn’t resist. I wanted to be as close as I could to the idea of destroying myself. It didn’t happen out of the blue. Day by day – moment by moment, I started to lose myself. With every kiss, you took away a part of me. Until one day, I woke up and I wasn’t myself anymore. I never thought that a disaster could be so damn beautiful. I don’t regret it. But I regret waking up next to an empty bed and how unceremoniously you left when the damage was done. I saw your picture today, holding someone else’s hand. And it made me realize that some disasters don’t make a sound. Not every destruction stands still. Some of them might walk right past you.
Bhavya Kaushik
I realised I really didn’t know what I was doing and I felt her trace drowning in the middle of the cars and the people, in the middle of the streets and far away, in the secrets she so jealously kept.I felt it. We were ever so close, ever so far.
Emiliano Campuzano
I figured we really shouldn’t grieve for those who leave us for God. They’ve arrived at their destinations with lucky souls no longer burdened by our piddling human considerations. It may seem cruel when they die so young or so beautiful or so loved. Cry not for them, for the life not lived. Cry only for your own hurt in missing them. That’s the only true loss. And in those sad moments when you remember a touch, or catch them watching from the corner of your eye, understand they left you with a lesson. Everyone who touches your life teaches you something important you’re meant to learn. Somehow their visit here pushed your own soul along its path. Learning that lesson is the best way you can honor them.
Lynnda Pollio
Like the long gone captains of the Confederacy, he stood watch at the edge of Dauphin Island, his old life just out of sight across the water. What he felt in those moments, pelicans skimming the chop, tankers lugging cargo to ports unknown, was not loneliness or loss, as you might expect, nor the weight of tragedy but its opposite, pure lightness, the hole left inside him by Suzette’s death as big and hollow as a zeppelin and just as buoyant, as if the shape of her absence might lift him up and carrying him away.
Michael Knight
Loss of any sort should stir up emotion; if it doesn’t, it’s because we’ve trained ourselves to be numb. We’ve bought into the great societal lie that emotional and sensitive is bad, is shameful, is weak, and worse yet is unlike Him.
Natalie Brenner
Sometimes people get taken away from you whether you want it or not. And sometimes that hurts so much, it might be easier to forget.
Cassandra Clare
All the sorrows of life are bearable if only we can convert them into a story.
Izak Dinesen
I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy, but he rarely verbalized complaints while courageously challenging his archenemy. He met pain and physical decline with 600-calorie workouts; he discarded anxieties somewhere along innumerable running trails; he faced death by running through life at full stride.
Brent Green
Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth.
Brent Green
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
It made him sad, realising that their smell was going to be gone for good one day. Even if they kept all their clothes, the scent would vanish eventually and become only a memory, just like everything else about them. Sometimes he thought he couldn’t even remember their voices anymore. There were photos of course, but it wasn’t the same. Although he had not hugged either of his parents in years, the thought of not being able to do so was too painful to bear, especially when he felt like he needed it. Eventually he would forget what it had felt like to be near his mum or what kind of a presence his father had. They were just going to be names, mere mentions in conversation that were glazed over and didn’t mean much to anybody.
Pamela Harju
I didn't look back. Sometimes, not looking back is the only mercy the world has left to show.
Seanan McGuire
all the tall mad mountains of her mind
Anne Carson
Marlena's body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive--deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she'd no doubt tell me all about soon.Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.
Julie Buntin
How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.
Danielle Ofri
He had not been sleeping well over Christmas. Actually, he hadn’t been doing anything well over Christmas – eating, sleeping, exercising, talking, looking after himself, laughing, crying… No, he hadn’t really been crying despite all the pain he felt. It was just tearing him up inside, quietly. It was like his insides were being ripped up by an angered tiger.
Pamela Harju
He loved me and I would rather have him become one with me than disappear from my life. Then I'd never have to be away from him ever again. He said I was important to him. So why did he leave me? How could he leave me?
Hitomi Kanehara
Revenge itself may indeed be the best revenge, but slaying one's enemy does not give back what they stole.
Emilie Autumn
Sadness grieves the spirit. But sorrow refines soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita
My ship had lost crew mates before, yet I sailed on.
L M Bryski
Tears don't bring people back." Pain stabs from my chest to my fingertips."Tears aren't for the people we've lost. They are for us. So that we can remember and celebrate and miss them and feel human.
C.J. Redwine
An Indian’s wealth   Is determined by what they lose And not by what they save.
Sherman Alexie
Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light.You can't see a black hole, but if you look closesly, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it - the way it changes the orbit of solar systems or draws off a star's light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center,Maybe we couldn't have stopped Jesse's collapse, but we should have seen it happening.
Shaun David Hutchinson
Every first is a loss.
Moïra Fowley-Doyle
Farewell, my dearest. You have but gone ahead...but I shall follow, and run, at last, again into your arms...and laugh away the years that came between.
Joan Walsh Anglund
{She} considered mentioning...how she, to, was all alone. But it didn't matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go...she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.
Michael Knight
Anja? What is to tell? Everywhere I look I'm seeing Anja... From my good eye, from my glass eye, if they're open or they're close, always I'm thinking on Anja.
Art Spiegelman
Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.
Roland Barthes
Over the following days and weeks I would come to see, with mounting weariness, that this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: marginal and grim; my habitual daydreams and memories of our life as a couple reduced to nothing, to stuttering salvoes, by the gunpowder of the simple physical truth of my husband's absence.
Marie Darrieussecq
If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I’d ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, “It’s all right,” I said, quickly. “It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later.
Elizabeth Berg
How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn't seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal.
William Kittredge
There is nothing I can give to the lost, except this: I have a responsibility I need to fathom. I have a sorrow I cannot weigh.
Michelle Dicinoski
He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless.
Christopher Isherwood
An ElegyA thousand times must we deploreThe lost will never come to life again;Even as flowing water runs away,Returning nevermore.Lady Kanin
Reiko Chiba
This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.
Jenny Erpenbeck
A man walks fast along the forecourt of the station towards a gate, moving towards a train that's about to leave. I get shivery all over as I watch the back of his head, which is about Yuan's height, with hair and a neckline just like his. My eyes tell me what my mind knows cannot be true. I follow him along seeking the one thing that would confirm him as someone else. The man turns his head slightly to talk to a train official. I can see his nose in profile. My eyes sting.
Dayo Forster
The man who doesn't howl at the moon when his mother dies is no man at all.
Marty Rubin

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