Quotes About Loss

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

In a household tragedy, you are very much aware of being alone. It is something that is possible to grasp, and that is why it hurts so much. Because you are alone. I know a little about this.

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

The only place you belong is the place you can never go back. And so yer always alone, forever and always.

I'm left, you're right, and she's gone. You're right, and I'm left all alone.

What do you do with your anger when the person you're mad at goes off and dies? Bury it? Bury it inside you?

Please let go your anger and please send my Saet Byul back. She is my everything

Anger can try to break your heart, but sorrow is what will. What can. What does.

There is no one quite as angry as someone who has just lost a lot of money.

I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever. Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead.

the inlet our friend looks as he did when we first knew him, and until I wake I believe I will die of grief, for I know that this boy grew into a man who was a faithful friend who died.

And yet a knowledge is here that tenses the throat as for song: the inheritance of the ones, alive or once alive, who stand behind the ones I have imagined, who took into their minds the troubles of this place, blights of love and race, but saw a good fate here and willingly paid its cost, kept it the best they could, thought of its good, and mourned the good they lost. (From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179)

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we know that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father's dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones.

Whatever is singing is found, awaiting the return of whatever is lost.

In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.

A living culture of work lived close to the ground, carried forward into time in the ordinary work and speech of every day, is as far as possible unlike any record that may be made of it. It may be documented as 'oral history', its stories may be remembered and written into books, it may be pictured in old photographs, but no true likeness of it can ever be reenacted or reproduced. When such a culture dies, it is not only dead, it is gone .

And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.

All through that bad time, when Virgil's absence was wearing into us, when "missing" kept renaming itself more and more insistently as "dead" and "lost forever," I was yet grateful. Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark.

Counting noses, Bess missed Andy and went to look for him. She found him finally in the dining room, in the corner at the end of the sideboard, crying. The knowledge of it passed over us all. He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

But grief and griever alike endure.

To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don't have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder.

He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.