Quotes About Loss

We did our best to understand the murder: the murderer was a part of our lives; not so the victim.

Karen told me about an old woman who was the last surviving inhabitant of one of the Hermit Islands. She was the only one left who could speak her tribe's language, but the anthropologists didn't realize it and never bothered to learn it from her. When the old woman died, the language died with her.

Their family and friends are the only ones who can understand the depths of their grief, the life's work of creating meaning in loss, of having their world shaped by violence they couldn't see coming and did not deserve.

father died, to help her adjust to her new reality. He was making the best of his current life—working at the nursery, teaching Community Ed gardening classes, and playing around with

Paulie Aandeg disappeared on September 5. September 5 is my due date.

She saw death as just another wedding she wasn't invited to.

Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap—that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself.

At my age, you don't cry for the loss of old friends. You make a noise, "Ah," that is an expression of sorrow, but also of contentment that your friend lived a good life. It is, I suppose, the sound, too, of loneliness—here is yet another person I will never see again.

buried by random events, ruined by confusion and grief.

but in Claire's mind it would always be Holly Golightly who stole her daddy. We belong to nobody and nobody belongs to us.

Maybe all love is hopeless.

But anyone who has been in love knows that love is just the beginning. You learn more every day, every year, every decade, and not just about the object of your affection, but about yourself, and about the nature of love itself, and eventually, about the nature of loss.

Your parents died. Your world fell apart. I nod. He puts his hand on my cheek. You were left drowning I nod again. And you're struggling to breathe I am. It's a constant struggle to stay near the surface I have just enough air to stop me from going totally under, but not enough to thrive. So do it. Breathe. Just Breathe. He turns up the volume and strokes my hair.

Dear Algebra, Stop asking us to find your X. She's not coming back

I want my mother right now. I want her so desperately that I physically ache to have her hold me, and it's absolutely bullshit that I have no one.

Everything about her shredded my heart because she reminded me too much of my mother, and she reminded me too much of my mother's death. I couldn't handle it. And so I pushed her away.

You are the great love of my life that I'm never going to have.

It's been too many nights of being with to now be suddenly without.

Gogol remembers having to do the same thing when he was younger, when his grandparents died...He remembers, back then, being bored by it, annoyed at having to observe a ritual no one else he knew followed, in honor of people he had seen only a few times in his life...Now, sitting together at the kitchen table at six-thirty every evening, his father's chair empty, this meatless meal is the only thing that seems to make sense.

Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end.

I'm flummoxed by this unraveling of time, I'm losing my grip on myself. I know that nothing awful will happen on the other side of the door. If anything, I'm about to have a perfectly forgettable day: a class to teach, a meeting with colleagues, maybe a movie. But I'm afraid of forgetting something crucial—my cell phone or my identity card, my health insurance or my keys. And I'm afraid of running into trouble.

For as grateful as she feels for the company of the Nandis and Dr. Gupta, these acquaintances are only substitutes for the people who really ought to be surrounding them. Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby's birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true.

She'd told Bela that the feeling would ebb but never fully go away. It would form part of her landscape, wherever she went. She said that her mother's absence would always be present in her thoughts. She told Bela that there would never be an answer for why she'd gone.

The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember.