Quotes About Loss

Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly.

The toll of the dead had been her business during the war, the endless stream of figures that represented the blitzed and the bombed passed across her desk to be collated and recorded. They had seemed overwhelming, but the greater figures—the six million dead, the fifty million dead, the numberless infinities of souls—were in a realm beyond comprehension.

He noticed that Ursula's ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.

she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife, and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost.

Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. "Gone," she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. "Just like that. All that exercise for nothing." Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion.

The war, Dr. Kellet said to Ursula, had made many people search for meaning in new places—"Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, anthroposophy, spiritualism. Everyone needs to make sense of their loss.

When Theo returned along St. Andrews Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing

one grief after another—her brothers, Father, the money, not to mention the war itself—had taken its toll on her and she had allowed herself to be worn down on the grindstone of Mother.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. —from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke

Because he gets scared, he becomes human. Because, my grandmother said, love makes you human. And the loss of love is pain, is fear, is sadness. The boy's wife had hurt him. Before he had nothing to lose, and now, of course, he did.

I half hoped Mr. Pearson would waLk out holding Thomas by the scruff of his neck, still wearing his boxers or pajama pants or whatever the hell a guy like him slept in. But seconds later, when Mr. Pearson emerged, he was red with rage and completely alone. Thomas was gone.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease - of the joy that kills.

She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

Per lei, il passato non era niente; non offriva nessuna lezione che lei volesse ascoltare. Il futuro era un mistero che lei non aveva mai provato a penetrare. Soltanto il presente aveva significato; era tutto suo, per torturarla, come in quel preciso istante, con la crudele convinzione di aver perso ciò che aveva avuto, e che le fosse stato negato ciò che il suo essere fremente e appena risvegliato anelava.

Robert's going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning, out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.

The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

that old unfulfilled craving became an obsession I couldn't escape, a black hole of raw grief I kept falling deeper into. 'Where are my children?' I felt their absence and loss as if they existed somewhere I couldn't reach, as if they were stuck forever on the other side of a membrane and I could never access them.

It is a horrible, terrible thing, the worst thing, to watch somebody you love die right in front of you and not be able to do nothing about it.

Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth. Time after time, my mind kept going to that empty spot, the spot where I felt like she should be.

Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away.

My heart, thought Edward, my heart is broken.

Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still.

I have already been loved," said Edward. "I have been loved by a girl named Abilene. I have been loved by a fisherman and his wife and a hobo and his dog. I have been loved by a boy who played the harmonica and by a girl who died. Don't talk to me about love," he said. "I have known love.

He was weeping. Although 'weeping' really is to small a word for the activity the kind had undertaken. Tears were cascading from his eyes. A small puddle had formed at his feet. I am not exaggerating. The king, it seemed, was intent on crying himself a river.