Quotes About Loss

When I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind - and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

Meet Mrs. Bundren

I could have used the money real well. But it's not like they cost me any-thing except the baking. I can tell him that anybody is likely to make a miscue, but it's not all of them that can get out of it without loss, I can tell him. It's not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him.

Then I begin to run. I run toward the back and come to the edge of the porch and stop. Then I begin to cry. I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls. Then it wasn't so. It hadn't happened then. And now she is getting so far ahead I can-not catch her.

But that competitor was Death, and Roger Shumann lost.

It ain't the man a woman cares for that reaps the harvest of passion, you know: it's the next man that comes along after she's lost the other one.

Hasta me acuerdo de cómo, cuando yo era joven, creía que la muerte era un fenómeno del cuerpo; sin embargo, ahora sé que no es más que una función de la mente: una función de las mentes de quienes sufren la pérdida. Los nihilistas dicen que la muerte es el final; los funcionalistas, que el comienzo; pero en realidad no es más que un simple inquilino o familia que deja su habitación o su ciudad.

Folks don't go to wars for fun. A man don't leave his maw crying just for fun.

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief

He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.

When we lose contact with the beloved one, we lose contact with the whole world.

But not in this world: things wore out, and you lost them in a thousand ways, preposterous and unconnected with any notion of devotion, martyrdom, sacrifice

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.

He never saw Molly again.

It was such an easy thing, death. He saw that now: It just happened. You screwed up by a fraction and there it was, something chill and odorless, ballooning out from the four stupid corners of the room, your mother's Barrytown living room.

How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you'd ever had them. (...) You didn't wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up.

I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine. (Hinterlands)

How she felt, now, was just the way she'd felt that day she'd come back to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there but a can of ravioli in a pot on the stove, with the can-opener propped up beside it. She hadn't eaten that ravioli and she hadn't eaten any since and she knew she never would.

Because she was dead, and I'd let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I'd helped her get that way. And because I knew she'd phone me, in the morning.

He said they'd been done in by the Beatles, so the food riots hadn't had to happen. The Beatles and losing their own Vietnam.

They seem to have accepted that she's gone." "I don't see how they could be sure she is. But I wish we'd known. Could've brought some flowers." "Daedra never suggested this. It seems to be a surprise." "A surprise funeral? You do that, here?" "A first, for me.