Quotes About Loss

Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

It's a happy life and someone is missing.

I want a book that acknowledges that life goes on, but death goes on too, that a person who is dead is a long, long story. You move on from it, , but the death will never disappear from view.

I'm thinking of that Florida lady again, the one who wanted a book about the lighter side of a child's death, and I know: all she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure instead of grief. To remember that he was dead, but to remember him without pain: he's dead but of course she still loves him, and that love isn't morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn't need to be shoved away.

He's right that war destroys … can destroy everything.

I lost Davey twice, retrieving him on the second occasion from the interior of a huge granite sarcophagus. I was tempted to leave him there, for a while, since he could not get out of it. But Emerson wouldn't let me.

When my grandmother touches my hair in my sleep, I feel like a lost child. There is never enough of her to comfort me.

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.

People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.

That was a strange thing, the death of Coco. Not that he should die, for owing to the unexpected folly of the concierge it was inevitable that he should, but his manner of doing it. Even at this distance of time, the remembrance agonises me. There

This is very unpleasant, Gertrud,' I remarked, and I wondered what those at home would say if they knew that on the very first day of my driving-tour I had managed to lose the carriage and had had to bear the banter of publicans.

But a part of me lies buried in lace and roses on a riverbank in France-a part of me is broken off forever. A part of me will be unflyable, stuck in the climb.

There is a classic moment in 'The Sun Also Rises' when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, "Gradually and then suddenly." When someone asks how I lost my mind, that's all I can say too.

Sometimes someone will be standing in front of me, and already I feel him walking away. It's only a matter of time, so what's the point?

It is hard to get back what is lost. It is more difficult still to begin anew.

On Christmas morning, Rebecca lost her moral virginity, her sense of humor - and her two best friends. But, other than that, it was a hell of a holiday.

He had no reason to want to avenge Horn, and for Applethorpe no vengeance would ever be enough. It was natural for him to want to hurt the man who had been the instrument of his first adult grief; natural, but not right.

Death is senseless yet makes way for the living.

The old man's dying was painless and feather-light, all the substance of his once sharp and vigorous mind gone on before; but it was slow. The fading candle flame did not flicker, only dimmed in perfect stillness second by second, so mysteriously that they missed the moment when the last spark withdrew, and only knew he was gone when they began to realise that the prints of age were smoothing themselves out gently from his face.

for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many.

At the thought of losing Grus, a puppy born a year before on the Endurance, Macklin reflected:

But she was no longer a ship. She was not even afloat, really.

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,And in a little while our lips are dumb.Let us alone. What is it that will last?All things are taken from us, and becomePortions and parcels of the dreadful Past.