Quotes About Loss

The thinnest shaft of light entered the empty chambers of my heart, just for a moment. Then it disappeared, extinguished by the weight of all that had gone before.

Die Toten hinterlassen ihre Schatten, einen Nachhall des Raumes, den sie einst bewohnten. Sie suchen uns heim, werden nie schwächer oder älter als wir. Wir betrauern nicht nur den Verlust ihrer Zukunft, sondern auch den der unseren.

Aber das hat dich krank gemacht, fuhr sie fort. Nicht sein Tod, sondern das danach.

Aber ich wollte nicht genesen, wenn ich dafür das wenige, das mir von meinem Bruder geblieben war, aufgeben musste.

Die derzeitigen und früheren Bewohner von Nulle wussten, wie abgründige Trauer den Geist zerfrisst.

There was no nobility in war. Only suffering.

If she wanted to go,' Bonnet continued, 'there's not a thing you – or anyone else – could have done to stop her. If it's any consolation, she won't have suffered. Pills, all very peaceful. Just gone to sleep and not woken up. It's what she chose.

That which was and is no more is hidden treasure.

But, deep in her heart she knew more than what the words read or heard seemed to say. She knew that every letter in every word in every war bulletin was, somewhere, first written in blood of men, of human beings, who had once smiled and sung songs, eaten, drunk, slept and loved.

And he has tried to swim that stream, And he swam on both strong and steady, But the river was wide and strength did fail, And never more he'll see his Annie. And woe betide the willow wan, And woe betide the bush and briar, For they broke beneath her true love's hand, When strength did fail and limbs did tire.

I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you? Have I told you his was a beautiful smile? Not the smile of a cynic, nor the easy, hungry smile of boys his age, whose smiles that aim to get them somewhere, are a commodity in exchange for God knows what. No. His was completely without intent; an accident of a smile. The kind of smile that would have surprised him if he could have seen it for himself. But he was too young to know his own extraordinariness.

People react in such complicated ways to any death, but particularly to the death of a parent, because a lot of what one feels is about oneself and the sense that nothing now stands between that self and dying. You have now become the older generation. I believe that the closer and more loving the relationship is, the deeper but simpler the grief. Of my father's children, my brother had the hardest time

Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the part you have to make up as you go.

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

My heart died. Arty would despise her. But Mama told me to go on hoping. Go ahead and love her, Mama said. I've wondered since whether those were Mama's last words, the final sizzle of her synapses.

I stared in silence as Miranda swooped, shrieking, down the playground slide, searching to see alive in her all the dead love in me.

I ran back dithering, chewing my hands in fright, until Arty finally allowed himself to roll slowly over and drift, belly up, toward the surface, where my short arms could reach him with the crook and tow him to the side. I patted and smoothed his water-swollen scalp and kissed his cheeks and nose and ears, weeping and begging him not to be dead because I, useless though I was, loved him.

The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating.

Things were slipping on me — oranges at first — then everything.

Bridge to Terabithia takes us by the hand and leads us into a room that we have never entered before. After we read this story, we cannot unknow what we now know. We are devastated, emotionally rent. But still: we feel held, loved, seen. Someone trusted us enough to tell us the truth; and because of that, the room is golden, brimful of light.

Brenda's pouting voice broke in, "Your girl friend's dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.

They gave Jesse all of Leslie's books and her paint set with three pads of real watercolor paper.

This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett's Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. Actually he was mortally wounded very close to Cemetery Hill on July 2 the day before that tragic charge.

He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name—John Goetchius—but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.