Quotes About Loss

There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.

I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what's called loving as I was - more lost and drowned afterwards.

She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work -- hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss -- loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.

Community is the place where are revealed all the darkness and anger, jealousies and rivalry hidden in our hearts. Community is a place of pain, because it is a place of loss, a place of conflict, and a place of death. But it is also a place of resurrection.

He has gone and we are missing him ! When you get accustomed to people or places or ways of living, and then have them snatched away, it does leave an empty, gnawing sort of sensation.

We all have a collection of memories that we would happily lose, but somehow those are just the ones that insist upon sticking.

One doesn't miss what one has never had; but it's awfully hard going without things after one has commenced thinking they are his/hers by natural right.

When you get accustomed to people or places or ways of living, and then have them snatched away, it does leave an awfully empty, gnawing sort of sensation.

Wind begins to whip up the sand. The tide has gone out so far that swimmers look like tiny dots on the horizon. The children run to stretch their legs on the beach once more before leaving, and Sylvie and I remain alone and silent, her hand squeezing my inert fingers. Behind dark glasses that reflect a flawless sky, she softly weeps over our shattered lives.

Why is the measure of love loss?

He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.

Someone once told me that the only good advice for grief is to stay hydrated. Because everything else is just chingaderas.

Less than two weeks ago, dirt on the floor in her hallway was a thing that could annoy her. It's unimaginable. The reality of what happened is so much worse than the very worst of her imaginary fears had ever been. But it could be worse still.

What love had been there was already slipping away. She could still sense it like a ghost in the room, vague and inanimate, but she could no longer feel it. Her affection had gone, leached out, like blood from a cadaver. When he squeezed her fingers, she caught the scent of formaldehyde. When he hooked his sad gaze into hers, she saw the glass of his lenses, spattered with blood.

His grief is not the same as hers.

He can prolong the moment of irrational hope that maybe some sliver of yesterday's world is still intact.

searches her gauzy memories, but it's no use. She can't remember why, and it doesn't matter anyway.

Marta's death changed everything, of course. It changed everything.

She can't even imagine how this loss will shape the person Luca becomes. They need to do a funeral ceremony as soon as they're safe. Luca will need a ritual, a method of fashioning his grief into a thing he can exert some small control over.

She wonders if he feels anything now, or if he's shut it all down, if Marta's death was too much for him, so he found a loophole, a way to opt out of humanity. She is stronger than he is; she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.

If there's one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it's that it's more immediate than grief.

She slams the trunk, walks back to the front seat to select one of his notebooks, not yet allowing herself to consider the reason she does this—to retain a personal record of his extinct handwriting.