Quotes About Loss

A stranger always hashis homeland in his armslike an orphanfor which he may be seekingnothing but a grave.

What an artist the world is losing in me

Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.

You may lose your most valuable property through misfortune in various ways. You may lose your house, your wife and other treasures. But of your moko, you cannot be deprived except by death. It will be your ornament and companion until your last day.

Anna's illusion of control had been smashed years before with the sudden, meaningless death of her husband. In the years since, she'd made an effort not to give in to the need to put the pieces back together, but to see and know and accept with some degree of grace that life is meaningless. There is no Grand Plan. Everything doesn't happen for the best. One can knock till one's knuckles are bloody and the door may not be opened.

jealousy was not about caring, it was about fear of loss: loss of love, loss of power, or loss of security.

Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.

It's no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

Every blade will wither and fade, As the old man dies again. Seasons pass, We're clinging to grass, 'Cause we've lost the sky again.

It's terrible when the old have to bury the young. But it is more terrible when neither the old nor the young are there to bury each other.

Ngotho had never known where the other son had gone to. Now he understood. He wanted to tell of his own son: he longed to say, 'You took him away from me'. But he kept quiet. Only he thought Mr Howlands should not complain. It had been his war.

I loved you once is among the saddest lines in humanity.

Listen, here's a human being who has suffered for love. It said Here's a heart aching, and that ache was large enough, urgent and familiar enough, for you all to feel it and by feeling participate in something you yourself were either too timid, closed or unlucky to have known personally, or had known in the long ago of your own innocence over which you had since grown the skin necessary to tolerate the loss and stay living.

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe.

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows." (p.223)

Where are you, Aeney? You slip away from me as you always did. Where are you?

My father's hand found the door locked. His calls to my mother went unanswered. He beat with his fists and called out her name, again and again, tears burning from his eyes. By the time I had come in the front door, the cake in my arms, he had broken his way in and discovered she was dead.

And I have this, for now. I just wish I could figure out how to keep my fucking mind from going all over the place - dwelling on all the loss and pain and everything I'VE DONE - then jumping off into the future to how impossible it all seems.

It happened so fast - so abruptly. An innocence I'd clung to was lost in that instant.

Maybe I don't want it to pass because that would mean an acceptance that life is like this: just a gradual process of loss.

It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.

In her scorching memoir, Keeper, about the two years she lived with her mother-in-law and her rapidly worsening Alzheimer's disease, Andrea Gillies asks, 'What it is that dementia takes away?' And she answers herself: 'Everything; every last thing we reassure ourselves that nothing could take away from us.

How do you ever get over the love of a child? How do you get beyond it?