Quotes About Loss

I don't know how late it got. I probably fell asleep, but I don't remember. I cried so much that everything blurred into everything else. At some point she was carrying me to my room. Then I was in bed. She was looking over me. I don't believe in God, but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything ever could be. But it was also incredibly simple. In my only life, she was my mom, and I was her son.

He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

there were so many different ways to die, and I just need to know which was his.

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.

He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depress the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower's remembrances that much more convincing and the pain that much more real.

I thought he had to look for what he was looking for, and realize it no longer existed, or never existed. p. 233

it broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of

We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe. But I knew there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There's no invention to get around that. And so, I felt that night like the turtle that everything in the universe was on top of.

she saw through the shell of me into the center of me … She went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me

Some of the names I could not reason, like the box marked DARKNESS, or the one with DEATH OF THE FIRSTBORN written in pencil on its front. I noticed that there was a box on the top of one of these skyscrapers of boxes that was marked DUST

Herschel was a Jew. And he was my best friend. He was his best friend. And I murdered him.

And was the next word I lost, probably because it was so close to her name, what a simple word to say, what a profound word to lose.

Dat is de tragiek van de liefde: je houdt van niets zoveel als van dat wat je mist.

That ghost of a smile fell away and receded and finally faded.

En el origen de toda historia yace siempre una ausencia

She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she has slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time.

I would give everything never to think about her again, I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

In the emptiness of evenings, serious and unequivocal, he would say: "How beautiful is forgetting! what relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents!

E' la tragedia di amare, non si può amare niente più di quello che ci manca.

My father's face, when he said that, dissolved into a stillness, a sad expression, sadder than human feeling.

But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.