Quotes About Loss

This is what I know - Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. My dog, who was dead in 1957, is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.

I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.

Some things melt before they become memories.

He wasn't supposed to die,' he cried out, somewhat desperately, petulantly, like a spoiled child. But I could hear other thoughts racing between us. Neither are you. Neither am I.

Some things are not lost but sacrificed.

Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we're gone?

Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn't serve anyone, and it's painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you're magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.

What is the song about? I asked. -Death, he answered with a laugh. But don't worry, nobody dies, it is the death of love.

I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.

Behind her smile I could see o many other things, a catastrophic sadness. I had assisted to the selfless guardians of the unfortunate children who suffered infinite loss, their family, their homes, and nature as they had known and trusted.

Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone?

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

I saw him paused before a headstone that read 'Son your mother is praying for you.

In all the world one may always hope to recapture something lost.

How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone? (P.92)

I felt a fleeting pang in my heart for I knew that innocent phase of our life had passed.

My love for him could not save him. His love for life could not save him. It was the first time that I truly knew he was going to die.

That is death. A disappearing act.

My mother was real and her son was real. When he died she buried him. Now she is dead. Mother Courage and her children, my mother and her son. They are all stories now.

It had been many months since I'd shed tears for Tomaso, but grief is like that. It's not a continuous process; it comes in waves. You can keep it at bay for a time, like a dam holding back a lake, but them something triggers an explosion inside of you, shattering the wall and letting loose a flood.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.