Quotes About Loss

I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.

The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you're young. There's a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don't know exactly what it is, just that it isn't there anymore. What opens up to you instead is experience, is cunning, is foreknowledge. Nothing you sought.

in death, he is not even the ghost he was in life.

Orang yang benar-benar berani adalah yang mencintai hidup dan mendambakannya sebagai harta kekayaan yang sekali hilang takkan dapat ditemukan kembali.

But he drank a lot. When love dies, he told me, there are no survivors.

You can tell about people by their absences. By the shape of the emptiness they leave behind.

The boy in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor. … He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. … He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.

But he's here- right here, he challenged shrilly. Daddy, daddy, speak to me! It's David! Reaching out his hand, he gently touched his fathers face. He drew back then, at once, his eyes distended with terror. He isn't! He is- gone, he chattered frenziedly. This isn't the father-part that KNOWS. It's the other- that they leave. He's left it behind him- like the squirrel, and the water in the brook.

Frente al espejo aprendió las palabras y las risas. Cuando se casó, Justino acaparó las palabras y los espejos y ella atravesó unos años silenciosos y borrados en los que se movía como una ciega, sin entender lo que sucedía a su alrededor. La única memoria que tenía de esos años era que no tenía ninguna. No había sido ella la que atravesó ese tiempo de temor y silencio.

se dijo con tristeza; el muerto era un yo descalzo

Una ola de ira inundo mis calles y mis cielos vacíos. Esa ola que no se ve y que de pronto avanza, derriba puentes, muros, quita vidas y hace generales.

Since the death of his daughter, a consumptive, he had not thrashed a woman; he lived alone.

The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life...He played that which he would never play again.

They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else's death.

Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.

Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.

It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.

Then the train resumed its journey, leaving in its wake, in a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb.