Quotes About Loss

Now that Olive was grown, I didn't know what to do with myself. You could build your life around one single thing, like a view or a child, but that was risky. You had so much to lose.

No, she's not," she said, shaking her head, looking right through me. "She's the daughter of someone who no longer exists." 67 Iwalked outside, the interior of the Jordan home feeling toxic and ugly.

My father just, literally, died in my arms. I notified all my kids and my lawyer notified Dina's attorney. Let's see if she has the decency and respect to bring my kids to the wake and funeral."OK! Magazine: Lindsay's Grandfather Dies (August 28, 2008)1

Alice in Wonderland was right: you do have to move twice as fast to stay in the same place, and when you're old, you're too slow to do it and so you lose ground. The future vanishes. You can't remember what you should do tomorrow and then you can't remember what you did today. And in the end all you have is long ago.

When you meet someone you love, then you change for good. That's why the other person will never know or understand the earlier you, and why you can never change back. And why, when that person starts to go, you'll feel the tear deep in your heart long before your head has the slightest clue what's going on.

The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern world. Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.

Grief is half of justice," she said, and added, a moment later, "the other half is a hope.

Grief is half of justice," she said, and added, a moment later, "the other half is hope.

and a line from Emily Dickinson that had been running through my head for months: "Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.

You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day.

For between them, ex-husband and wife, some unspoken body of love has been laid to rest, and they stand awkwardly next to it now, regarding it in its coffin.

Days pass and years pass and you light the holy candle of yourself by the glimmer of someone else, and just when you think you're burned out on her, you realize that she's the single thing that raises you above yourself. And now she's dumped you flat and taken up with a lumberjack or that sensitive guy in town who runs the bookstore or the FedEx man who wears tight shorts in the summer. That guy? How could she?

And my parents, whose end I can't imagine. And then, of course, me, the one trying to find a reason for living in the first place.

What if I forget her voice?' Sara said. 'You won't,' I said. 'You sound just like her.

Grief is schizophrenic. You find yourself of two minds, the one that governs your days up until the moment of grief—the one that opens easily to memories of the girl at six, twelve, eighteen—and the one that seeks to destroy everything afterward.

Here's how you think about it: Together you constructed many things throughout your life. Then her body disappeared, but the constructions still remain. Human beings die: That's natural. But to accept her death is to lose all hope.

The trauma of discovering her body, unmoving in the brackish water of the bathtub, had aged him ten years.

I wonder why things always seem most real to us when we lose them, he said softly.

Jealousy is a terrible thing. I know all the psychological triggers. The fear of losing control, the fear of loss, the fear of abandonment, neglect and loneliness...But the most destructive thing about jealousy is that it kills what it values-the love you want to save won't survive the constraints of jealousy. There is no entitlement. Love is either equal or a tragedy.

I have been visited by every shade of grief and know that it doesn't come in black or white

People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.

Sometimes people don't come back,' said Rachel. 'That's why you should always make your goodbyes count.

Why give me this life and then give me this disease? Why give me joy and beauty of you and Charlie and then snatch it away? It's like showing someone a glimpse of what life could be like and in the next breath telling them that it can never happen