Quotes About Loss

All my life I've made friends and lost lovers and talked about these two activities as though they were very different, opposed; but in truth love is the direct and therefore hopeless method of calling Orpheus back, whereas friendship is the equally hopeless because irrelevant attempt to find warmth in other shades. Odd that in the story Orpheus is lonely, too.

I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wiped out in the next.

I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending, particularly love that has never been fully realised. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things. short story Sister Imelda

I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother's death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son.

so many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son.

Gabriel, the man she might have tied the knot with except that it was not meant to be. Putting memories to sleep, like putting an animal down.

Mr. Coaxyoram himself and many a young girl soft on him, but oh, what a gentleman and from a scion of gentlemen. I learned that it was his horse, Red River, that would be played for. He had given it to his friend Jacksie who had lost his all gambling, and the lady he'd been engaged to had jilted him and had not even returned the engagement ring that was his mother's, which was an heirloom.

If I could feel like myself I'd thank God but I don't feel and never will.

Silage making is more practical than saving hay. When you watch an animal die you think how sad it must be to see a human die. My best days I have seen out.

THE TWO OTHER GIRLS in the room, Mabel and Deirdre, said I imagined it. But they were wrong. My brother appeared to me there. A beam of light from the streetlamp lay in a crooked zigzag along the floor, toward the bed, and my brother stepped onto it, his face pensive but not crying, dressed as he might be for a wedding, his good suit, his collar and tie, and not a mark on him, no bloodstain

motherless mothers with their skinless mysteries.

Michael, my darling light. Be sure to have Masses said for the repose of his soul and for us. Your loving mother, Bridget

her untimely death. Death for her meant death for us both.

I cannot be certain what I would have said. I knew that there was something sad and faintly distasteful about love's ending, particularly love that has never been fully realised. I might have hinted at that, but I doubt it. In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things. Edna O'Brien, short story Sister Imelda, in Returning.

My mother is dead, my mother is dead," she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in. It is outside of her, it is a figment, both because it is so sudden and because she cannot pinpoint the exact moment, it being such and such a time in one land and a different time on the clock of the other. It had happened in lost time. The three previous days are jumbled

Pero, en estos tiempos, es como si el mundo desapareciera cada día. De vez en cuando es un tiempo que no existe. Es inútil apostar por él. Durante más de dos años yo aposté, con cuerpo de perdida y dignidad de caballero, por un tiempo inexistente. No me quejo. No me arrepiento. Puse algo de dinero. Un gramo de locura. Un montón de afecto. Quizás amor. - Nazdrave! Afortunadamente, el amor ya no es lo que era.

I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves; independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion. And what is gained is loss.

A person is not really gone until everyone who knew them is gone.

At length, in the twenty-fourth year of her marriage, and the twenty-second of her reign, she was consumed by a cancer; ^39 and the irreparable loss was deplored by her husband, who, in the room of a theatrical prostitute, might have selected the purest and most noble virgin of the East.

Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards...

Celeste had no love for Henry either, but death had taken all his power and now she could afford a little bit of charity.

Robbins, with Dora and Louis on either side, did not speak. A storm came into his head and he missed a good part of the service.

We have all been robbed of the land we have loved for a thousand years. Do you not see that, Welshman? Can you not imagine his rage? We were not even conquered. We were deceived.

Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool.