Quotes About Loss

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

In A Man With a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we love them, equally and always.

On June 9, 1942, R?žena Spieglová was one of a group of Czechoslovak Jews sent by rail transport to the Nazi concentration camp in Terezín. On June 12, they were transported farther east to a destination we do not know for sure, probably a forested area in occupied Poland. There were no survivors from that transport. My maternal grandmother was fifty-four years old when she was murdered.

What shook Ling the most was that she wasn't even angry. Anger, too, could dissipate, but this emptiness that took its place might never be released.

She says that she held on to the memory as if it were a touchstone, something that could anchor her. She knows, has always believed, that there is a secret that has coloured her life, her childhood. In the last few months, she has felt as if, day by day, she is losing her footing. There are fissures, openings, that she no longer knows how to cover over.

Silêncio. Quietude. A pulsação a criar uma calma absoluta. Uma Maior Consciência na perda de toda a percepção. A Flutuar agora. Ausência de perda. Ausência de medo. Ausência de tempo. Ausência de som. Uma perturbação. O centro a quebrar-se como vido negro

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

Bring him back to me,' he told them.

Patroclus, he says, Patroclus. Patroclus. Over and over until it is sound only.

I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river. The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms. The memories come, and come. She listens, staring into the grain of the stone. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.

It is right to seek peace for the dead. You and I both know there is no peace for those who live after.

Achilles weeps. He cradles me, and will not eat, nor speak a word other than my name.

The sorrow was so large it threatened to tear through my skin. When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

I lay back and tried not to think of the minutes passing. Just yesterday we had a wealth of them. Now each was a drop of heartsblood lost.

When he was gone, would I be like Achilles, wailing over his lost lover Patroclus? I tried to picture myself running up and down the beaches, tearing at my hair, cradling some scrap of old tunic he had left behind. Crying out for the loss of half my soul. I could not see it. That knowledge brought its own sort of pain.

He knew, but it was not enough. The sorrow was so large it threatened to tear through my skin. When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

I did not plan to live after he was gone.

Priam's eyes find the other body, mine, lying on the bed. He hesitates a moment. 'That is --- your friend?' 'Philtatos,' Achilles says, sharply. Most beloved. 'Best of men, and slaughtered by your son.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?

Do not try to take my regret from me.

I do not know this man, I think. He is no one I have ever seen before. My rage towards him is hot as blood. I will never forgive him. I imagine tearing down our tent, smashing the lyre, stabbing myself in the stomach and bleeding to death. I want to see his face broken with grief and regret. I want to shatter the cold mask of stone that has slipped down over the boy I knew.

I could not make him a god," she says. Her jagged voice, rich with grief. /But you made him./

Then the best part of him died, and he was even more difficult after that. [...] "What was his best part?" "His lover, Patroclus. He didn't like me much, but then the good ones never do. Achilles went mad when he died; nearly mad, anyway.