Quotes About Loss

It's as if you've been shot in the heart, Bill, but you're unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!

The way you remember or dream about your loved ones - the ones who are gone - you can't stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don't get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind - in your dreams, in your memories - sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.

Loved ones leave us and we go on—ghosts or no ghosts, my way or Molly's, we still see them. As Matthew and I knew, the dead don't entirely go away—not if you see them on the subway, or in your heart.

If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it's dark; he'd lose the ball.

Don't ever die, Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that HE would die if he lost Pepe.

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.

Grief is contagious," Marion began again. "I didn't want you to catch my grief, Eddie. I really didn't want Ruth to catch it.

Mother and Egg would meet us in Vienna the next day; Sorrow would fly with them.

GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT.

Once a Garp, then an Arp, now only an Ar; she knew he was dying. He had just one vowel and one consonant left.

And I? With Egg and Mother gone—and Sorrow in an unknown pose, or in disguise—I knew we had arrived in a foreign country.

You write about when it's safe for a widow to re-enter the world, but there is no such thing as a widow for one year. I will be a widow for the rest of my life!

Okay," I said. I still have that photograph, though I don't like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.

Quel ch'è più arduo ad accettarsi, riguardo al passare del tempo, è che le persone che un tempo contavano tanto per noi siano adesso chiuse fra due parentesi.

At Owen Meany's burial, one of Owen's Sunday school classmates remembers how easy he was to lift up. "He was so light—he weighed nothing at all! How could he have been so light?" Because God already had His hands on him—that's how.

Sorrow," Frank kept repeating, until he fell asleep. "It's Sorrow," he murmured. "You can't kill it," Frank mumbled. "It's Sorrow. It floats.

Owen and I were eleven; we had no other way to articulate what we felt about what had happened to my mother. He gave me his baseball cards, but he really wanted them back, and I gave him my stuffed armadillo, which I certainly hoped he'd give back to me—all because it was impossible for us to say to each other how we really felt. How did it feel to hit a ball that hard—and then realize that the ball had killed your best friend's mother?

Don't you see, Johnny? If he could, he would cut off his hands for you—that's how it makes him feel, to have touched that baseball bat, to have swung that bat with those results. It's how we all feel—you and me and Owen. We've lost a part of ourselves.

Then I got up and went to the bathroom door and asked her if there was anything I could get her. "Thank you," she whispered. "Just go out and get me yesterday and most of today," she said. "I want them back." "Is that all?" I said. "Just yesterday and today?" "That's all," she said. "Thank you.

He had just one vowel and one consonant left.

Your first loss of a loved one, the first death of someone dear to you—when it happens, the pace of everything changes. In the past, there were times when nothing seemed to be happening. When you lose someone, you're aware of the earth's motion; the world is always moving, always ahead of you. For the rest of your life, you know there are other deaths coming—one after another, yours included.

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.

There's no one around to answer all my questions now that Ben's gone. It's a stark fact that continually reasserts itself each time I wonder what I'm supposed to do now. That brown robe he wore might as well have been made of pure mystery; he clothed himself in it and then left nothing else behind on the Death Star. I

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood, So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is-- I hold it towards you.