Quotes About Loss

Michiko Nogami (1946—1982)" Is she more apparent because she is not anymore forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, "The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.

The heart never fits the journey. Always one ends first.

I keep trying to feel who I was, and cannot. — Jack Gilbert, from "Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina," Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment, crying hard, searching for my wife's hair. For two months got them from the drain, from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator, and off the clothes in the closet. But after other Japanese women came, there was no way to be sure which were hers, and I stopped. A year later, repotting Michiko's avocado, I find a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Another Grandfather" Every generation tells of how the good world died.

Slenderman can invoke memory loss in all but the most resolute - you could have already had a Slenderman encounter and not remember it.

Only two out of every ten men born in Russia in 1923 survived the Second World War.

Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared.

The dead are home before us, daddy, she said. But we have work to do.

But the children are not fine. They will never be.

the world is full of pain, uncertainty, and injustice. But in this vulnerable human life, every loss is an opportunity either to shut out the world or to stand up with dignity and let the heart respond.

If we gain something, it was there from    the beginning. If we lose anything, it is hidden nearby.

Home. It is the place where once we lived and laughed, where we grew up with the assumption that all would be well, where we met our first love, where life stretched endlessly ahead. This is the place that now becomes a desert of the heart. —Kory Tyler, Musings, 1412           Gabe

but loss is the one constant we all have to deal with. It's the price of living. We lose parents, friends, relatives. We lose the place we grew up in, and we lose the whole circle of our acquaintances. We spend ungodly amounts of time wondering whatever happened to former teachers and lovers and scoutmasters.

We don't fear death because we lose tomorrow, but because we lose yesterday, with its sweet poignancy, its memories of growing children, of friends and lovers, of all that we have known. Nobody else has really been there in the way we have. And when the lights go out for us, for you or me, the lights go out in that world, too.

Because to live forever with a grief that deforms the heart is unacceptable—an abomination that must not be tolerated.

Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine.

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.

Afscheid nemen van een geest is definitiever dan afscheid nemen van een geliefde. Zelfs de doden keren weer, maar een geest die, eens bemind, weggaat, keert nooit meer weer.

You are young; you have hopes. One by one they will go, and nothing will be left but the bare fact of life.

If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.

We don't get over losing the dogs who have been a part of our lives. We just get used to living without them.

No one should presume to tell you or me that we will never again see our pets that died many years ago.

For an Animal that Has Died or Is About to Die Loving God, our beloved pet and companion, (name), is on its final journey. We will miss (name) dearly because of the joy and affection (name) has given to us. Bless (name) and give him/her peace. May your care for (name) never die. We thank you for the gift that (name) has been to us. Give us hope that in your great kindness you may restore (name) in your heavenly kingdom according to your wisdom, which goes