Quotes About Loss

I kept thinking about how they were all the names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing that dead people keep.

No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time

Maybe we're just missing things we've lost, or hoping for what we want to come.

But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone.

It's better to lose something than never to have had

Yankel's lipstick autobiography came flaking off his bedroom ceiling, falling gently like blood-stained snow to his bed and floor. You are Yankel. You love Brod. You are a Sloucher. You were once married, but she left you. You don't believe in an afterlife.

that night was the first time your mother and I made love since I returned, and the last time we ever made love, it didn't feel like the last time, I'd kissed Anna for the last time, seen my parents for the last time, spoken for the last time, why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was my last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future

It's better to lose than never to have had. I lost something I never had. You had everything.

I am so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

Jonathan Safran Foer

In another place, their sons were killed between the barbs of their own guard wire, killed with misfired bombs while squirming in the mire like animals, killed with friendly fire, killed sometimes without knowing that they were about to die - a bullet through the head while joking with a comrade, laughing

There were those who suspected that he was not pinned under his wagon but swept out to sea, with the secrets of his life kept forever inside him, like a love note in a bottle, to be found one morning by an unsuspecting couple on a romantic beach stroll.

Every time I left our apartment to go searching for the lock, I became a little lighter, because I was getting closer to Dad. But I also became a little heavier, because I was getting farther from Mom.

A Lutsk ti ho comprato dei libri, le disse Yankel chiudendo la porta a prima sera, chiudendo fuori il resto del mondo. Non possiamo permetterceli, ribatté lei afferrando la borsa pesante. Domani dovrò restituirli. Non possiamo permetterci neanche di non averli. Qual è la cosa che possiamo permetterci di meno: averli o non averli? A mio parere, perdiamo in ogni caso. Meglio perdere con i libri.

His words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

She went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me.

So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? How had all the presence summed to disappearance?

Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness.

Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss.

I couldn't explain to her that I missed him more, more than she or anyone else missed him, because I could't tell her about what happened with the phone. That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.

Maybe we're just missing things we've lost, or hoping for what we want to come.

Isaac was buried in a pocketless shroud, six hundred yards from his wife of two hundred thousand hours.

In the modern world, the meaning of the dead to the defeated is a bitter, unhealed wound, where defeat rarely means obliteration of the people and the civilization. As we recently witnessed in the Persian Gulf War, defeat may not even bring the fall of the opposing government. At the level of grand strategy in Vietnam, the United States had been defeated, and yet American soldiers had won every battle. For the veterans, the unanchored dead continue to hover.

Men become mothers to one another in combat. The grief and rage that they experience when the special comrade is killed appears virtually identical to that of a child suddenly orphaned, and they feel that the mother within them has died with the friend.