Quotes About Loss

She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.

My father is dead! As soon as he'd said it, Fiskadoro saw he'd made it true again--again for the first time. Did it just go around and around? He began to see that his sorrow wasn't simple. It wasn't one thing, but a thousand things carrying him away to the Ocean: the work of a person's life was to drink it.

Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.

But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.

Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, "This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.

Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She'd lost her future to death, and lost her child to life.

He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Granier that here had come a fire stronger than God.

people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

He had no idea what missing was. Missing was lying in the dampness of your tears night after night. Missing was a constant hollow spot in the center of your chest. Missing was a yawning ache that was never satisfied.

My uncle's death confirmed a suspicion of mine that madness and religion were a hair's breadth away.

The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.

She died in a fire. I miss her like you... If I was underwater, I wouldn't miss oxygen that much.

Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

Angie was where most of me began and all of me ended.

Twelve dead?" I said. "Jesus.

Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can't remember when a block of it didn't rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can't be repaired. What, if lost can't be replaced. I love my burdens.

My father's gone, Joe said eventually. Emma's dead. Your brother's dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you're one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?

All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That's all gone around here, my friend.

Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone,' he sang.

Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we'd shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we'd had and those selves we'd been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you'd never read again.

But do we lose our past to assure our future?