Quotes About Loss

Killing was easy. Dying was something else.

Marseille ist keine Stadt für Touristen. Es gibt dort nichts zu sehen. Seine Schönheit lässt sich nicht fotografieren. Sie teilt sich mit. Hier muss man Partei ergreifen. Sich engagieren. Dafür oder dagegen sein. Leidenschaftlich sein. Erst dann wird sichtbar, was es zu sehen gibt. Und dann ist man, wenn auch zu spät, mitten in einem Drama. Einem antiken Drama, in dem der Held der Tod ist. In Marseille muss man sogar kämpfen, um zu verlieren.

I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.

After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, I fuck therefore I am.

Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.

This hole in my heart is in the shape of you. No one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.

I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.

I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.

When Jordan was a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung. And I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly, and when he had eaten his fill he left me. Jordan... I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river and in the flood-tide he slipped away.

How long before the shouting starts? How long before the tears and the accusations and the pain? That specific stone n the stomach pain when you lose something you haven't got round to valuing? Why is the measure of love loss?

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn't poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.

Yes. Just pass me my leg will you? It's on top of the wardrobe where he threw it, and I think my right arm is leaning over by the wall. My head is in the gas oven but it will probably be all right, I'm told that green colour wears off. Unfortunately I threw my heart to the dogs. Never mind. No one will notice how much is missing from the inside, will they?

I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.

The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost.

We gamble with the thought of winning. But it's the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone.