Quotes About Loss

Patrick's own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother's said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole. Heaven was the other direction and so the woman was lying, unless it was like sending a parcel.

Most people either felt regret at staying with someone for too long, or regret at losing them too easily. I manage to feel both ways at the same time about the same object.

Mary that that 'swift return' was going a bit far. She glanced nervously at the coffin, as if Eleanor might fling off the lid and hop out any moment, throwing open her arms to embrace the word, with the awkward theatricality of the photograph on the order service.

As he poured himself a drink, David thought about his dead father-in-law, Dudley Craig, a charming, drunken Scotsman who had been dismissed by Eleanor's mother, Mary, when he became too expensive to keep.

When happy, we possess something we love; when anxious, something we love is at risk; when despondent, something we love has been lost; when angry, something we love is being stolen or kept from us.

When we first listen to depression, we find that the misery is consuming. It doesn't point anywhere or say anything. It just is. But when we keep listening, it tells stories of loss, rejection, or other events that happened to the person. It speaks of identifiable physiological problems. It points to a culture of irony: the culture with the most peace, money, and leisure is also the one with the most malignant sadness.

In an African hospital, a pastor who had just witnessed another death was approached by a poor, elderly woman. "You know," she said, taking my [the pastor's] arm, "through many losses of family and friends and through much sorrow, the Lord has taught me one thing. Jesus Christ did not come to take away our pain and suffering, but to share in it."2

The lightness returned. That airless sensation of his body evaporating. Darline and Paris were fading, too. They were becoming distant longings, silhouettes, shadows fading on the ground. There are loves that outlive lovers.

Perhaps Hurston saw in her mother, Lucy, a version of Persephone, who is so missed when she's gone that the world literally starts to die. This type of grief, as Toni Morrison writes in Sula , has no top and no bottom, just circles and circles of sorrow.

There's no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material.

I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.

There are loves that outlive lovers.

They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?

Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it? Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.

They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.

For those we don't see For those who are not here.

Each death frames previous deaths in a different light, and even deaths to come. During the time my mother was sick, I found myself crying uncontrollably over the deaths of people I barely knew.

The only way to save them is to immediately sever them from the place where they are born. Otherwise they will always spend too much time chasing a shadow they can never reach… San manman, motherless, was the way you described someone who was lost, brutal and cruel. Fantom, ghost, was another. People without mothers, it was believed, were capable of anything.

We cannot write about death without writing about life. Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning - or to some beginning - to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost.

Speculators buy the trend; investors are in for the long haul; they are a different breed of cats. One reason that people lose money today is that they have lost sight of this distinction; they profess to have the long term in mind and yet cannot resist following where the hot money has led.

He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit. It is absolutely wrong to gamble in stocks the way the average man does.

She hugged him, then kissed him. Then she was gone. He never saw her again.

I've been to many funerals of funny people, and they're some of the funniest days you'll ever have, because the emotions run high.

Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.