Quotes About Loss

Things break all the time. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Promises break. Hearts break.

when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw

I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in... It broke.

I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it.

Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

there was not much distinction between losing a friend and a lover: it was all about intimacy. One moment, you had someone to share your biggest triumph, and fatal flaws with; the next minute, you had to keep them bottled inside.

When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.

If you think about someone you've loved and lost, you are already with them. The rest is just details.

What you had could never make up for what you'd lost.

Here's what no one ever tells you about love: it hurts, having your heart broken

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?

But I didn't frame it; I put into an envelope and sealed it and stuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It's there, just in case one of these days I start to lose her. There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulders. Maybe one of these days, I will not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.

Annie turned away, her eyes glittering. 'Here's what no one tells you,' she said. 'When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.' She looked up at me. 'You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn't do the wrong thing. But I don't feel like I did the right thing, either.

If you had to pack your whole life into a suitcase-not just the practical things, like clothing, but the memories of the people you had lost and the girl you had once been-what would you take?

Yes, she is. He looks at me, his face carved in pain. She is dying, Sara. She will die, either tonight or tomorrow or maybe a year from now if we're really lucky. You heard what Dr. Chance said. Arsenic's not a cure. It just postpones what's coming. My eyes fill up with tears. But I love her, I say, because that is reason enough.

Sometimes I think there's no such thing as falling in love. It's just the fear of losing someone.

The first time someone I loved left me behind...I didn't know how my family would balance. We had been such a sturdy little end table, four solid legs. I was sure we would now be off-kilter, always unstable. Until one day I looked more closely, and realized that we had simply become a stool.

When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.

I once read that every story is a love story. Love of a person, a country, a way of life. Which means, of course, that all tragedies are about losing what you love.