Quotes About Loss

He knew that I was living in loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil's absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.

Of course, what I wasn't telling myself, and maybe was trying not to know (though I did know), was that at Squire's Landing, and Goforth too, things were already changed. The things I was remembering were gone from everywhere except my mind.

I was changed by Nathan's death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was my life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.

But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

Our minds were driven out of the old boundaries into the thought of absolute loss, absolute emptiness, in a world that seemed larger even than the sky that held it.

When my grandfather was dying, I was not thinking about the past. My grandfather was still a man I knew, but as he subsided day by day he was ceasing to be the man I had known. I was experiencing consciously for the first time that transformation in which the living, by dying, pass into the living, and I was full of grief and love and wonder. And so when I

The customers of The War (all of us, that is) purchase life at a great cost and yet lose it.

knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it came also from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectation, to fall short.

Beyond all history that he knows, Where trees like great saints stand in time, Eternal in their patience. Loss Has rectified the songs that come Into this columned room, and he Only in silence, nothing in hand Comes here. A generosity Is here by which the fallen stand.

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!

For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura's dress.

Change is growth; love is never lost.

Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us. I am still not capable – or rather unwilling – to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere. (on the passing of Amos Vogel, his friend for more than 45 years)

Grief is love in another form.

Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander, Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished. Memory fingers in their hair of murders Multitudinous murders they once witnessed. Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander, Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.

The dust that fell unnoted as a dew, Wrapped the dead city's face like mummy-cloth

But let my death be memoried on this disc. Wear it, sweet friend. Inscribe no date nor deed. But let thy heart-beat kiss it night and day, Until the name grow vague and wear away.

There breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray As men's are, dead.

With him they buried the muzzle his teeth had kissed, And truthfully wrote the Mother, Tim died smiling.

And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan. And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hid Its bruises in the earth, but crawled no further, Showed me its feet, the feet of many men, And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.

Darker and darker, he said; farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young - and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave the closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End.

Let us say your wife dies——