Quotes About Loss

All that might have been good in my life had been destroyed by the Tornado God.

It seems to me that when you look back at a life - yours or another's - what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. Our histories, like my father's current body, are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall of that last summer in New Bremen is a construct of both what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.

When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what's left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he's led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame him and cry out against him for not caring? What's left to us when that which we love most has been taken?

there would be no sign that Molly Nurmi had ever been. In the time before the cold science of the whites came to Iron Lake, the Anishinaabe believed the water was bottomless. There was a tradition among the Iron Lake Ojibwe. Before they were married, a couple would take strands of their hair and braid a cord. On the day they were wed, they tied the cord around a stone, canoed to the middle of the lake, and dropped the stone into the water. The stone descended forever, they believed

I'd considered loss only from my own perspective and Albert's and Mose's and Emmy's, because our parents had been taken from us. But it worked the other way, too. Losing a child, that had to be akin to losing a good part of your heart.

NOTHING IS EVER everything, but the loss of a true love feels that way.

His father had been murdered fifteen hundred miles away. He was just gone. He became the emptiness of the cabin, and that's how Ren had thought of death. Emptiness. A grabbing at air. A conversation stopped in mid-sentence. A body from which the soul had simply departed.

As I walked away he called to me and when I turned back he said, "They're never far from us, you know." "Who?" I asked. "The dead. No more'n a breath. You let that last one go and you're with them again.

Believe me, Buck, if you have family, you can lose everything and still count yourself a rich man.

Yeah." Parrant gave him a brief smile of thanks. But he was a man way on the other side of something terrible, and the look in his eyes came from far, far away.

a loss of the connection with the Great Mystery, the spirit that ran through all creation and united all things. Those men, Stephen understood, were

over our house. My mother became nearly mute and more often than not the only sound from her was weeping. She kept the curtains drawn so that it felt as if permanent night had fallen. Never much concerned anyway with her mundane domestic duties she completely stopped cooking and cleaning and sat for hours in the quiet dark of the living room. She was flesh without spirit, eyes without sight. It felt as

In a way, he was afraid that to let go of the grieving would be to let go of his father forever.

Maybe the dead have finally gone to rest." "They never do, Bo." He thought about the dead who were with him now and who always would be, and he knew Otter was right.

Ghosts. There were too many of them in his life now. He lifted his glass, and with the last swallow of his sherry, he toasted the dead.

It's as if your parents have to die before you really understand who they are.

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.

I never expected to lose in court. In practice, I did lose, of course. Every lawyer loses, just as every baseball player makes an out seventy percent of the time he goes to bat.

Studies have shown that fathers of murdered children often die within a few years of the murder, often of heart failure. Really, they die of grief.

Somebody stitched three holes in a line across that boy's chest and left nothing to indicate who or why.

Parents of murdered children have it worst, and to me the fathers have it even worse than the mothers because they are taught to be stoic, to "act like a man.

Ricky's genuine presence, his new capacity to feel deeply, to ache—had come about only as a product of her dying. It was a joke she would have appreciated.

As the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre observed, several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.

History is a warning to ourselves, and only by remembering where we have been and how low we have fallen can we know to where we aspire, but we lose everything when it is history that drives us completely, as it drove Nat and his mother and her mother