Quotes About Loss

I am so sorry for you, Leslie.' She said it like she really meant it. But not like she was completely surprised. 'And for him. Because he's lost you now.' This last part undid me. Despite her cruel criticism of me over the years, from where she sat, I was anyone and everyone's prize.

I had so much love in me that I never considered what moving for love would mean, what I might leave behind that could never be found again.

Fear is a sneaky thief, stealing away precious moments of your life.

There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything--a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job--is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning--get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of "closure" and move on.

But grief is also a tonic. It is a healing elixir, made of tears that lubricate the heart.

Grief, after all, is like smoking in a damp country — what was at first a necessity becomes afterwards an indulgence.

This is one of the dangers of sorrow: that in our grief for those who are gone we lose our interest in those who are living, and slacken our zeal in the work which is allotted to us.

whatever stream their weeping willow is planted beside. Samuel Dickey Gordon When from my life the old-time joys have vanished,

Today you see only your loss, but then you will see how God used it to break the evil chains that had begun to restrain you.

He had finished his quest, and it had cost him everything and everyone he'd done it for. The equation balanced perfectly: all canceled out. And without his crown, or his throne, or Fillory, or even his friends, he had no idea who he was. But something had changed inside him too. He didn't understand it yet, but he felt it. Somehow, even though he'd lost everything, he felt more like a king now than he ever did when he was one. Not like a toy king. He felt real.

Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well.

There must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them, something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed but the scar wouldn't fade, not quite.

As soon as he seized happiness it dispersed and reappeared somewhere else. Like Fillory, like everything good, it never lasted. What a terrible thing to know.

I thought about what time is, how we're broken every second, we're losing moments all the time, leaking them away like a stuffed animal losing its stuffing, until one day they're gone an we lose everything. Forever. And then, at the same time, we're gaining seconds, moment after moment. Every one is a gift, until at the end of our lives we're sitting on a rich hoard of moments. Rich beyond imaging. Time was both those things at once.

It was a shock to see them go,

The world around her, the straight world, the mundane world, had become to her a blowing wasteland. It was empty, a postapocalyptic world: empty stores, empty houses, stalled cars with the upholstery burned out of them, dead traffic lights swaying above empty streets. That missing afternoon in November had become a black hole that had sucked the entire rest of her life into it. And once you'd fallen past that Schwarzschild radius, it was pretty damn hard to claw your way back out again.

By the time he was thirteen it was all over. Edward's gift evaporated like dew in the harsh dawn of puberty, painlessly and almost overnight, and though afterwards he could clearly remember what it was like to wander through those gleaming mental corridors, the doors to that secret edifice were now firmly closed, the silver key lost, the path overgrown, never to be found again. His ranking plummeted, and his matches became a series of tearful early concessions.

It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

Oh well, another dream dies.

She'd broken her staff and drowned her book and sworn off magic forever.

Now, even though things would never be the same, even though they'd never be together in the same way, at least he could always remember it the way he wanted to. The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.

Egli la guardava, come l'uomo guarda il fiore da lui strappato e appassito, in cui riconosce con difficoltà la bellezza per la quale l'ha strappato e rovinato.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

Everything changes." It's not hard to understand this teaching as an intellectual fact; we learn it naturally by living it. But emotionally this teaching means that everything we love and care about—including our family, friends, and even our precious self—will change, transform, and eventually pass away.