Quotes About Loss

A country watches dumbstruck as New England's priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.

Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss.

She has seen dieback across the West. Aspens are withering. Grazed on by everything with hooves, cut off from rejuvenating fire, whole groves are vanishing. Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

The trees have vanished and the town forgets. But not the land.

Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

Extinction) Twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half of them will snuff out in her lifetime.

Her staff tells her not to, but she cites the numbers. Wasn't Shaw right about how the mark of true intelligence is to be moved by statistics? Seventeen kinds of forest dieback, all made worse by warming. Thousands of square miles a year converted to development. Annual net loss of one hundred billion trees. Half the woody species on the planet, gone by this new century's end.

She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

Chester's death had almost killed him. All the grief over Alyssa that he'd suppressed in order to protect me tore out of him when the crippled old beast gave up.

You're the last bearable thing left to me, aside from death.

Rage, the radical tip of a grief that time will never root out.

L'amore è un ciclo di feedback dal desiderio alla condivisione, alla perdita. Un moto anti-hebbiano: le attivazioni si fanno sempre più fiacche. (p.243)

THEIR FIRSTBORN DIES in infancy, killed by a thing that doesn't yet have a name. There are no microbes, yet. God is the lone taker of children, snatching even placeholder souls from one world to the other, according to obscure timetables.

Of course, grief. Grief for a thing too big to see.

She looks for the towering black locust, with its fragrant racemes and pea-pod seeds, the tree that stunned Muir into becoming a naturalist. But the world-changing locust was cut down twelve years before.

Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

But he'd survived his mother's death. I figured he'd survive my best intentions.

Too many species to count. Reefs bleach and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.

The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one's tongue.

How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.

In ten days and 1,600 sorties the Twentieth Air Force burned out 32 square miles of the centers of Japan's four largest cities and killed at least 150,000 people and almost certainly tens of thousands more.

Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.