Quotes About Loss

Out in the palace gardens, groundskeepers buried statues in the dirt. As Justice and Peace were entombed together, a workman wrote on one flank "We'll come back for you." The grave was covered with leaves to conceal it. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

I always knew death of this relation would be the death of my life.

I always knew death of this relation would beat the death out of my life.

We all lose dreams and cherished people, which could make life a continual experience in despair. But if we lean on the great two-thousand-year-old faith of the church, then life is a continual experience of the salvation of God, to whom we belong. In God's hands nothing, and no one, is ever lost. Our only comfort. According

Does having three other children lessen your pain over the one who is lost? Not lessen the pain, no. But it keeps me wanting to draw breath. It keeps me alive. In nurturing and caring for another child you can love the child you lost.

It's not until a person's world blows up in front of his very face that he yearns for the return of that subtle boredom and

He fished steadily, trying to fight down a dragging, aching sense of loss, wondering how one's brain should know all the sensible answers while one's emotions longed for the unattainable.

Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.

The People's Republic of China loses its republican sheen when it comes to territory and turns imperial even if it cannot always get imperious.

The hardest thing to give up in the world is hope. And of every relationship we have, the one between a mother and child is the most profound. It is, therefore, the most difficult one to accept when it is broken.

Love, like energy, never dies. You lose people only in the moment. But time is a long road that circles back. At some point the missing turns into love and returns.

Missing is one of the true tragedies in life," he says. "That ache that nothing soothes. I thought time would soften it. It's supposed to, isn't it? But all these years later, I still long for what I had. What we all had. What is no more.

One and whole, together, the loss and repair belonging to each other," Picasso said. "Over time, all paintings are damaged one way or another. A painting cannot survive a long time unscathed.

Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.

Someday I'll give it to her. When everything is better. The natural history of her life, sketched out, because nothing means as much until it has vanished.

because nothing means as much until it has vanished.

It is one of the sick ironies of the war that they probably would not have been able to if they had not learned to absorb loss in the nightmare of Stalin's purges.

By noon on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had destroyed more planes than they did in a whole year of their air assault on Britain. The Russian air force had been neutralized almost without firing a shot. The Western Front's air force commander, staggered at the overwhelming futility of the loss, took out his gun and killed himself.

Shostakovich later said, Even before the war, in Leningrad there probably wasn't a single family who hadn't lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us. This requiem allowed them to mourn together, in public.

When our parents are alive, they stand in front of us, blocking our view of death. But once they've gone, we find ourselves at the cliff edge.

Em todas as ruas te encontro em todas as ruas te perco conheço tão bem o teu corpo sonhei tanto a tua figura que é de olhos fechados que eu ando a limitar a tua altura e bebo a água e sorvo o ar que te atravessou a cintura tanto tão perto tão real que o meu corpo se transfigura e toca o seu próprio elemento num corpo que já não é seu num rio que desapareceu onde um braço teu me procura Em todas as ruas te encontro em todas as ruas te perco

o amor é uma chave que deve perder-se

Nineteen months ago, he mourned, partridges were here. Nineteen months ago the open pine forest was compassionate. What rare concentrated tragedies will have occurred within another nineteen months—not here, for this place has bred a tragedy greater than any recorded in the Nation's past—but elsewhere, all over the South, through back roads and on wharves and in legislative rooms, in foundries which rust because the fires have gone out?

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.