Quotes About Loss

Death, like life, finds meaning in our connections to each other. Grief is bearable only because it can be shared.

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.

My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.

Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.

The graves grow deeper. The dead are more dead each night. Under the elms and the rain of leaves, The graves grow deeper. The dark folds of the wind Cover the ground. The night is cold. The leaves are swept against the stones. The dead are more dead each night. A starless dark embraces them. Their faces dim. We cannot remember them Clearly enough. We never will.

She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

The best thing is to grieve for the people you loved and lost, and then welcome and love the new people life puts in front of you.

Pino's head swung slowly back and forth. "But where will I go to . . ." "See her?" his father said. "You go to where you were both happiest, and she'll always be there. I promise you that.

If we lose love, all is lost.

For the eight thousand Italian Jews who could not be saved. For the millions taken slave by the Nazi war machine, and the countless who did not make it home. And for Robert Dehlendorf, who heard the tale first, and rescued me.

in a matter of seconds, his faith in God, in life, in love, and in a better tomorrow drained away to empty.

They want us down to nothing, Emil, people with no pasts!" Emil held his wife as she trembled and shook, feeling as helpless as she did.

We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose.

The randomness of what had been destroyed and what had survived bothered him nearly as much as the destruction itself. He

Because we are refugees of war now, people who left their lands behind. We have nothing, so we get to say nothing.

the world. They died in the 1980s.

It is a tragedy that your Anna died that way, but you had the right to survive. Every human has that basic, God-given right, Pino, and you feared for your life.

power was bleeding from Benito Mussolini's grasp like joy from a young widowed heart.

The truck sped up, and Adeline's cousin spiraled out of her life like a leaf caught in a gale.

The best thing is to grieve for the people you loved and lost, and then welcome and love the new people life puts in front of you." Pino

People are dying and you're playing music?" Several people came into the hallway behind his mother, including his aunt, uncle, and father. Michele said, "Music is how we survive such times, Pino.

Pino took one last look at the Beltraminis before walking south toward the telephone exchange, feeling like the blast had cut out part of his heart.