Quotes About Loss

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

Each one of us has to find such a relationship in the suffering that we ourselves experience, be it the loss of a job or a home, the death of someone we love, rejection by our parents or our children, the breakdown of a marriage, institutional injustice, social violence or whatever. The causes of our personal suffering are many. And when we find the living, liberating answer that gives us meaning in the midst of suffering, we realize that it is a very personal answer.

In that moment, I was not sad about any one thing, but about everything. The tragedies I had witnessed in the previous months all piled up and overflowed into one big, clumped-together sadness and suffering that I couldn't escape. It is what my friend William Paul Young calls the "Great Sadness," a pain so huge and deep, it feels as though it will never end. And yet the sadness was focused not on one particular issue but on all of them at once.

The loss and renewal pattern is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be called a secret at all.

Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all. Feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, ironically pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given—with no necessity and so gratuitously. All beauty is gratuitous. So whom can we blame when it seems to be taken away? Grace seems to be at the foundation of everything.

When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul.

What you can't afford to lose is precisely what the world robs you of. How it knew what you needed the most, just so it could deny you that very thing, was a question for philosophers. Answer it and you'd have the kind of book Tom Ford would've considered worth writing: urgent and new and absolutely necessary. To write it, though, you'd have to be on fire.

The loss of a place isn't really so different from the loss of a person. Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence. This happened. I was there.

We even discovered that our fathers had the same favorite saying: "Money talks. It says goodbye.

It seemed probable to me that my companion on the bus had lost someone, and that the loss had changed everything, created a truth that could not be modified, only accepted, reread.

I'm not hurting. That's the strange part. I don't mind losing the house, or anything in it. I know I should, and I'll probably feel better when I do, but right now I just feel bored. I'd even feel better if I thought there was some tragic flaw, some error in judgment I could trace everything to. If I could look back and say I'd missed a sign, and that if I hadn't, things would've been different.

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.

Do you know what it means to look at a headless baby sitting in a shovel? It is as if all the languages in the world have been forgotten, as if all the books ever written have been given up to dust. And that you are glad of it. Because such people as we have no right to speak or write or leave any trace for history.

When loved ones depart forever, all that remains is the light from their eyes trapped in their jewelry. Beyond memory, it is the only souvenir we ever keep.

Is it odd to picnic at one's mother's grave? To sit up on the cliff and trickle pebbles over the ledge and listen to them bounce until they disappear? To eat an apple, to feel the sun, and to remember her, she who gave so much that it will never diminish? Is it odd to live with ehr in you, to continue to share your days and thoughts with the presence of her loving spirit?

Some people say with the wolf kept out, our country lost its wildness. There was room for plant eaters but the woods are not the same as they were. The shadows of the forest are different, the wind is different.

I wondered why, after such a great loss, they ever let us out of their sight. Later I realized that it was their way of fighting that loss, sitting there in the darkness and feeling, vicariously, our hearts running through the night, and through the woods-a way of speaking to the sorrow, and to Mother, too-a way of saying that all had not been for naught, that her children's lives and joy would be irrepressible, because they had come out of her.

It is a gradual kind of strengthening. It takes a long time to see how the losses build you up, rather than strip you down and wear you away.

In four more years, after Grandfather died, Father would move to Fredericksburg and start a garden: not yet tired of living, but tired, I knew, of wondering what he had missed.

Dad, she can't be dead. She's my mom. She can't be.

Light lost to the darkness here.

The anguish pulled Karen's broken heart down, blurring through the years of her life to when she was young and took her little sister, Cassie, swimming at the Monarda River. She was supposed to watch over Cassie, but Karen was crazy about a boy and intent on playing a game with him, and it had ultimately led to Cassie's death.