Quotes About Loss

He is wearing his golden armour again, the boy who'd been my friend disappearing into a man I don't know.

Siempre hay algo que perder

What do you think he did to me to deserve to die?' I ask. He stokes the fire. Sparks fly up. 'I assumed he broke your heart. An eye for an eye, a heart for a heart.

The song he sings is of lost places and homes so far away that they are no longer home. He sings of love so intense it is indistinguishable from hate, and chains that are like riddles of old, no longer holding him, yet unbroken.

I taught myself to call them unmother and unfather. I keep the habit to remind myself of what they were to me, and what they will never be again. Remind myself that there is nowhere that I belong and no one to whom I belong.

But when you were gone-truly gone beneath the waves-I hated myself as I never have before.

The tan carpet was stiff and black with stripes of dried blood, spattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas. The walls were streaked with it, handprints smearing the dingy beige surfaces. And the bodies. Dozens of bodies. People she'd seen every day since kindergarten, people whom she'd played tag with and cried over and kissed, were lying at odd angles, their bodies pale and cold, their eyes staring like rows of dolls in a shop window.

The weight of the sea seemed to pass down on him. He no longer had a sense of up or down. One was always suspended, fighting against the current or giving in to it. There would be no lying on beds of moss, no barbed words easily spoken, no falling down from too much wine, no dancing at all.

I want to feel more, but every time I look at it, I feel less.

But for one final night, he's the father I remember best

I can see when the light goes out of his eyes, like a torch thrown into the sea.

That's what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband.

Taryn takes a breath, as if steeling herself. "He's dead because I killed him.

I lost your cloak,' I croak up at him, my voice coming out all breath. He peers down at me. 'You're a liar,' he says, eyes glittering with fury. 'A dirty, mortal liar.' I close my eyes again against the harshness of his words.

I used to wish that Madoc never went looking for those girls, and now all I wish is that we could be together again as we once were.

By you, I am forever undone.

That I had suffered a loss. I thought about the word suffer and about the act or the state of suffering. I thought about enduring. About bearing the burden, about tolerating the pain, about learning to reconcile myself to this new, stark reality.

The point is to turn your grief into love. The roses are helping you find grace.

Everything that has ever been beautiful has been burned. Like you.

Even for women without children, trading hours that produce income for hours that produce "only" art seems like a foolish decision. What a loss for the world, though, to have women's voices silenced because art is our last priority.

She was beginning to think that the death of somebody you loved was like throwing rocks in a pond. Piles and piles of rocks: the ripples kept on spreading, disrupting the smooth surface of your life long after you'd lost track of where, exactly, the rocks went into the water.

By the ships there lies a dead man, unwept, unburied: Patroclus.

Remembering this, he [Achilles] wept bitterly, lying now on his side, now on his back, now on his face.

All happiness lasts but a moment, and the time that follows is only good for remembering what we have lost. —Homero Aridjis, Persephone (Vintage, 1986)