Quotes About Loss

We have conquered everything, and everything has slipped out of our grasp.

Sometimes when we lose something of importance what we have left becomes even more precious.

If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can't. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn't know that it's not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.

Before my mother's death, I sat anywhere. Now I look for the image of the empty chair near the image of the empty table. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.

I know the heart doesn't really shatter, but I also can no longer feel it.

The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

My mother, now covered, was no longer my mother. A covered apple is no longer an apple. A sketch of a person isn't the person. Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in.

When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them.

The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What's left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.

Before this other stone appeared, my mother's stone was still my mother because of the absence around her. The appearance of the new stone and the likeness to her stone implied my mother was a stone too, that my mother was buried under the stone too.

At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.

When a mother dies, a house becomes a forest. My children, children, know that I am in the trees. True love means you won't find me.

The way grief is really about future absence.

This time gap can never be overcome. The difference is called grieving.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

People die . . . so love them every day. Beauty fades . . . so look before it's gone. Love changes . . . but not the love you give. And if you love, you'll never be alone.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.