Quotes About Loss

Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. ...... Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself...Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes.

Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to diner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water.

So she told me she was pregnant, it was an accident, and she wanted to know what to do and I went into the ladies' room because I knew I was going to cry and I didn't want to cry in front of her and I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly and then I heard the bomb and when I finally got out part of her was in the sherbet and part of her was in the street and you, you son of a bitch, you want someone to remember her.

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty, Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.

A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty.

Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

la historia de un hombre que regresa a un lugar que amó y se encuentra a las tres de la madrugada haciendo frente al conocimiento de que él ya no es la persona que amó ese lugar y ya no volverá a ser nunca la persona que había querido ser.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.

All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more.

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

It's all gone with you, he said. It used to be there but it's gone. Listen, she said as if by rote. I love you.

Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it

There's no justice in who dies

It was one of the mysteries of modern life, what happened to old love.

Nicholas went to choral evensong on the Sunday, and could have wept. They sang part of a Tallis motet and he thought, If the time comes when nobody can hear this sound anymore, it will be the end.

This is awful," Sally said. "Why should it be so painful?" "Because you don't realize how important your human landscape is until bits drop away." He gripped her hand. "It's worse when you get older. In your twenties, you never think—