Quotes About Loss

more damaging loss to his reputation than that suffered thirty years before by his father, James IV

His two infant sons had died the previous year

the feeling that I was becoming no one at all

Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred.

In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt.

She taught me that the world would continue without me. And eventually I learned that lesson. It took some time...Everything is cliche. Her death taught me that life is short.

I wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything? And by the time I faced my own mortality at the Bookmill in western Massachusetts, how much less would I have done? Her leaving taught me about the worst sadness, one we all must face eventually. I feel lucky I am better equipped to help others who are going through it now.

There is no peace in dying.

There are transitions in life whether we want them or not. You get older. You lose jobs and loves and people. The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don't even notice. It's never any fun, but it can't be avoided. Sometimes you just have to walk into the cold dark water of the unfamiliar and suffer for a while.

It is a consuming knowledge, an overwhelming sadness for what is lost that makes enjoyment of the present impossible.

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

Sorrow floats.

Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.

O God — please give him back! I shall keep asking You.

If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.

The hardest thing to accept about the passage of time is that the people who mattered most to us are all wrapped up in parenthesis

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don''t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time.

Ambition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

When people die, Vargas - I mean the people you will always remember, the ones who changed your life - they never really go away, Pepe told the young doctor.

We don't always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly-as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth-the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.

It was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp.

His resolve was blown as quickly as the rest of him.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.