Quotes About Loss

A house you can rebuild; a bridge you can restring; a washed-out road you can fill in. But there is nothing you can do about a tree but mourn.

The only way to know how much you love a thing is to see it in peril of being lost.

Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.

The dead don't bother haunting graveyards- they are the last place on earth they need to haunt. The living do that job for them with their messy combination of grief, desire, imagination. There is nothing in this cemetery. It's just an empty field.

The first day without you is painful in a way that is almost exquisite. I imagine quitting smokers must feel like this, or crash-dieters - the early determination, where the loss of what you have given up is replaced with the adrenaline of denial.

Before my daughter was lost to me, I might have attributed his apparent stillness and control to a lack of feeling, but now I know, to my cost, that appearing unfeeling is the price we sometimes pay for being able to speak at all.

Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever." ? Louise Doughty, Whatever You Love

Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.

WHEN SOMEBODY GOES AWAY THERE'S THINGS YOU WANT TO TELL THEM. WHEN SOMEBODY DIES MAYBE THAT'S THE WORST THING. YOU WANT TO TELL THEM THINGS THAT HAPPEN AFTER.

Safe Deposit I thought that I could keep it? the light on the running tide, how your eyes give you away no matter what you hide. I thought that I could hold it? the forest along the sand, your neck bones like pearls underneath my hand. But time's school has taught me how petals brown and die. There's no saving pleasure. Don't try. Don't try.

Our thinking creates our experiences," she began. "That doesn't mean the loss didn't happen or that the grief isn't real. It means that our thinking shapes our experience of the loss.

All those stars in that big streak that goes over the whole sky? You see them? Those are all the Jews who've died. All of them died and went up in the air, and the stars are the stars that they wore on their coats. The stars on the coats come off when their souls float up and the stars live up in the sky forever.

Life is loss. But out of that, as the book stresses, comes freedom. If we can accept that nothing is permanent, and change is inevitable, if we can adapt, then we're going to be happier people.

His theory is that life is loss,' said Myrna after a moment. 'Loss of parents, loss of loves, loss of jobs. So we have to find a higher meaning in our lives than these things and people. Otherwise we'll lose ourselves.

Beauvoir knew that the root of all evil wasn't money. No, what created and drove evil was fear. Fear of not having enough money, enough food, enough land, enough power, enough security, enough love. Fear of not getting what you want, or losing what you have.

The women in the room chatted about love, about childhood, about losing parents, about Mr. Spock, about good books they'd read. They mothered each other.

She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.

The terror of falling asleep knowing that on waking she'd relive the loss, like Prometheus bound and tormented each day. Everything had changed. Even her grammar. Suddenly she lived in the past tense. And the singular.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter's death and to that sorrow she'd added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she'd fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.

Sounds like being a therapist. People normally came into my office because something happened. Someone had died, or betrayed them. Their love wasn't reciprocated. They'd lost a job. Gotten divorced. Something big. But the truth was, while that might've been the catalyst, the problem was almost always tiny and old and hidden.

What could be worse? Dying, and not being missed.

They don't teach this at medical school, but I've seen it in real life. People die in bits and pieces. A series of petites morts. Little deaths. They lose their sight, their hearing, their independence. Those are the physical ones. But there're others. Less obvious, but more fatal. They lose heart. They lose hope. They lose faith. They lose interest. And finally, they lose themselves.

when people died, they didn't go away. They were very much alive in the minds, in the hearts, in the vivid memories of those left behind. And they were not always easy to live with. Some ghosts had demands.

They don't teach this at medical school, but I've seen it in real life. People dying in bits and pieces. A series of petites morts. Little deaths. They lose their sight, their hearing, their independence. Those are the physical ones. But there're others. Less obvious, but more fatal. They lose heart. They lose hope. They lose faith. They lose interest. And finally, they lose themselves.