Quotes About Loss

PERHAPS ONE OF the reasons I've avoided having a clear ambition is that second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose. It's always been this way.

El padre de Jordana falleció el año pasado. Recuerdo cuándo sucedió, cómo se le notaba en los ojos después esa muerte, como un alfiler clavado en el centro de su ser. Duelo, pérdida, dolor, resistencia ante todo ello. Me obligo a mirarla de nuevo. Ahí está, la veo. La tristeza. Un añadido permanente, incluso cuando Jordana está en frascada en otras cosas, como nuestra clase. ¿También yo la tengo en la cara?

Your mother, was she clear in her mind until the end?' he asked, knowing it was invasive and cruel to do so. Because his mother had died years before her body did, Brunetti was unable to judge which sort of death was worse and for whom. In all these years, although he had asked many people who had lost a parent, he had never had an answer that would decide the case for him.

a great comfort faith can be to those left behind.

Brunetti asked, surprised how painful he still found the thought of his mother. He had tried for the last year, with singular lack of success, to tell himself that his mother, that bright-spirited woman who had raised them and loved them with unqualified devotion, had moved off to some other place, where she waited, still quickwitted and eager to smile, for that befuddled shell that was her body to come and join her so that they could drift off together to a final peace. 'I

but all that you will have now, and for the rest of your lives, is loss and pain and the terrible sense that you somehow failed this boy. And no matter how deep your knowledge that you were not responsible for it, your certainty that you were will always be deeper and more absolute.

Death made real time meaningless

Why was it that the words with which we confronted death always sounded so inadequate, so blatantly false?

How quickly he fell; how soon it was over.

The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star...

But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal—to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time.

I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.

People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I'd lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination

Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?

Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that sort of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.

with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there.

I'd unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.

She did not care for children's books in which the children grew up, as what "growing up" entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

Twelve years after Robin's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened.

still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was falling asleep so maybe I'd dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smell of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she'd been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away against a sunstruck wall.