Quotes About Loss

Do you think I'll stop worrying when I know he loves me for sure?" "Just listen to yourself." "There's so much to lose." "There always is," she said.

He was never yours, a voice in my head said. But what did that matter? I had lost him just the same.

I'd managed to ignore how the ceremony would take away the boy I knew for ever and also the fierce warrior girl who had loved him. It already had. Those children were gone.

but none of it was real any more. We lived on a ghost farm.

With this much loss, you begin to think it's in the blood, as if there's a dark magnet pulling the body in that direction—pulling, maybe, from the beginning.

A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered.

But the loss came with moments of incredible happiness, and the feeling of being seen and understood, of being found. There might be no future, no future at all, but time had sharpened into an unforgettable point. And that was a version of forever. That might be the only version of forever worth reaching for.

Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn't know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me.

and yet just now, in my cold cot, I felt strangely close to him. It was his life I was reaching for in coming here, and if I couldn't have my father back, exactly, maybe not ever, I could have the rightness of looking in the same direction, of stepping into his shadow with my own. I didn't know a thing about marriage or men—that had been proven well enough. But I did know horses. For the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I should be.

we never survive them, or anyone we love. Not in the

I had the pure sense that I couldn't ever truly lose the past, or forget what any of it had meant.

During an interview; Then McLain returns to the impact on Markham and Blixen of the death of Finch Hatton. "You know, there's a line at the end of my book that goes, 'This time with Denys would fade, and it would last forever.' That's something I actually believe about love. Sometimes we don't get to keep the people we love the most and who change us the most. That's an unromantic, uncommercial view of love. But to me it feels absolutely true.

I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her." What

We had both tried for the sun, and had fallen, lurching to earth again, tasting melted wax and sorrow. Denys wasn't hers, or mine.

My mother in that awful parking lot, dead on Christmas Day. Jenny's murder and Eden's cancer. Hap's disappearance. My daughter's accident. The dark abyss of my work and how it connects in an awful and yawning way to everything else.

I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

It's hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they'll live forever. Only no one does." "Yes, that's love for you.

C'mon, Anna. You don't mean that. It's too soon. You should only be thinking about your family right now, and taking care of yourself.

I haven't been drunk in over a year—not since my mother fell seriously ill—and I've missed the way it comes with its own perfect glove of fog, settling snugly and beautifully over my brain. I don't want to think and I don't want to feel,

This war was only about greed, it seemed to me, and insanity. Adolf Hitler was a madman—everyone knew that—but he was also a child, a red-faced, angry baby bent on total dominion. There had been a time, perhaps, when the world could have joined forces to stop him, but that had come and gone. Now, there was only a chance to temper the size of the catastrophe, to staunch the loss of lives, thrashing back against evil with torches or pitchforks.

This is your life's work for a reason. The things you've lost have drawn you to help these children and young women. I think you know that already, but you can't see what I can.

Life is change, Anna. We don't get to keep each other.

Love anything . . . and your heart will be wrung. The more you succeed at love—the more you will have to lose. But honestly, would playing it safe and hedging your bets take you any place you really wanted to be? And as painful as love can be, could wisdom be won by any other means?

Old lovers are like socks. They always show up full of static cling and missing their mate.