Quotes About Loss

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it.

It's not that there is ever a shortage of people—oh, heavens no. It is merely that—as the years pass—there comes to be a terrible shortage of your people. The ones you loved.

I am very empty in the bank since the bomb.

had a husband once. He played the saxophone." "Oh, dear. So we may assume that didn't last?

My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, What are your songs about? He replied, Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse.

THe church is full of flowers-yellow roses, lilies, blue hydrangeas spilling forth-and it is on these that Charlie trains his gaze and looks for his mother, who is nowhere to be found. Not even her ashes are in the church, and no coffin, but this is less hard to comprehend than the fact that she is not herself there, a thin old bird, an egret maybe, standing on one leg, head bobbing, long neck swiveling. Contradicting, adding and subtracting. poking fun. Peering out.

It took a moment to recognize Timothy... her first love. There had been a time when the mere sight of his handsome face had made her catch her breath. It had taken her years to recover from losing Timothy. Now the pain of his loss was muted and somehow apart from her, as if a broken engagement had happened to some other young, naive girl. She looked at him, and all she could think was, Thank Goodness. Thank goodness she's escaped marrying him.

Ye know as well as I that I lost whatever heart I once had long ago," Mick replied without emotion, a simple statement of fact. "If the babe lives, or if she dies, it makes no difference to me. I'll still eat sweetmeats on the morrow and taste the sugar on me tongue, still f*ck women and feel the pleasure in me bollocks. And, Charlie—mark me well, now—I'll still kill ye and laugh in yer ugly face as I do it.

She watched his chest rise and fall and remembered and reflected. All her life things had been taken from her: Apollo, Thomas's affection, Mama and Papa, her home, her future. No one had ever asked her opinion, garnered her thoughts on what she wanted or needed. Things had been done to her, but she'd never had the chance to do things. Like a doll on a shelf, she'd been moved about, manipulated, flung aside.

He thought he saw her smile waver when she read it, then she was hugging him tightly. "You're the one who needs to take care of yourself. Your escape is still all the news. They'll be searching for you." She drew back to look at him, and to his consternation he saw that she had tears in her eyes. "I couldn't bear to lose you again." He bent and kissed her forehead. Even if he could speak there was nothing he could say to comfort her.

When he died, she took her hopes for a child and wrapped them carefully in a box and buried that box deep, deep in her heart. So deep, she thought never to face that dream again. Except, with one sentence, Edward had exhumed the box and ripped it open. And her hopes, her dreams, her need to bear a child were as fresh now as they had been when she was newly wed.

Oh, yes. I suppose not many remember now, but Maximus was so shattered by the deaths of his parents that he went mute for a full fortnight. Why, some of the quacks that came to look at him said his brain was addled by the tragedy. That he'd never speak again. Rubbish, of course. It simply took him time to come to rights again. He was quite sane. Just a sensitive boy." A boy who, when he came to himself again, was no longer a boy but the Duke of Wakefield, Artemis thought.

You'll be haunting my tomorrows evermore.

And what of those losses that seem unbearable? Separations from people we feel we can't live without?' 'Perhaps our ruin honours the strength of our love.

I had to give myself up to you for your lifetime. What is faith when you feel you've lost something forever? I had to have you--someone I could lose forever.

My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

And I always return to the illusion that we are still together, and then -unwillingly- to the knowledge that you have made a hostage of my memory...

I hadn't realized before seeing him how thoroughly alone I'd felt on that rain, headed toward the unknown, headed perhaps toward the larger loneliness of being unable to find my father or even toward the galactic loneliness of losing him forever.

Old women who live long enough mainly count the bodies, whether we want to or not.

He was simply gone, and he took all our peace with him.

I often remember that dusty, ruined flat in old Beirut. And I know that a little part of me will stay there forever, laying out those treasures on the windowsill and playing at cat's cradle with my friend.

A suicide bomber detonated a massive bomb outside a café in Jerusalem this afternoon. Eleven Israelis were killed. Four of them were secondary-school students, relaxing after their exams. The bomber has not been named.

If we do not suffer a loss all the way to the end, it will wait for us. It won't just dissipate and disappear. Rather, it will fester, and we will experience its sorrow later, in stranger forms.

what feels like such a painful loss now will become something beautiful later on. You cannot escape your destiny. You can certainly try. People do so every day. They hold on tight, and the river just dries up.