Quotes About Loss

it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place. But

The messenger who came with the news, he said that when they brought the boys back to camp, Ahmad Shah Massoud personally oversaw the burial. He said a prayer for them at the gravesite. That's the kind of brave young men your brothers were, Laila, that Commander Massoud himself, the Lion of Panjshir, God bless him, would oversee their burial.

You'll have others, Inshalla. You're young. Surely you'll have many other chances. But Mariam's grief wasn't aimless or unspecific. Mariam grieved for this baby, this particular child, who had made her so happy for a while.

I rolled him over so he faced me. He felt light as a dream. I placed a kiss on his dry, cracked lips. I put a pillow between his face and my chest and reached for the back of his head. I held him against me in a long, tight embrace.

It was a spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to loose. Faith that the world will not destroy you...

Avea deja mai multe jucarii decat ar fi avut nevoie. Si nu exista nicio jucarie pe pamant care sa compenseze absenta tatalui sau.

marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on. Laila thinks of her own life and all that has happened to her, and she is astonished that she too has survived, that she is alive and sitting in this taxi listening to this man's story.

Mais la bataille qui se livrait en lui se lisait sur son visage. Et sa peur aussi. Pas seulement celle qu'il éprouvait pour moi et ce qui risquait de m'arriver à 4500 kilomètres de chez nous. Mais aussi la peur qu'il avait de moi. Sa peur de me perdre. Sa peur devant mon absence, de réduire en pièces son coeur mis à nu et vulnérable si je le décidais, comme un doberman déchiquetant un chaton.

This fragile, trembling little glimpse of how it could have been between us. All it will beget is regret, I tell myself, and what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.

Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung that she was not the reason. She would never leave her mark on Mammy's heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

His parents were executed in the street. The neighbors saw it. You have death certificates? - Death certificates? This is Afghanistan we're talking about. Most people there don't have birth certificates.

Khaled Hosseini

Giti was killed, collecting pieces of her daughter's flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti's decomposing right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later. At Giti's fatiha, the day after the killings, Laila sat stunned in a roomful of weeping women. This was the first time that someone whom Laila had known, been close to, loved, had died.

Too many young Afghan men are dying this way.

Later, after Rasheed had dropped them off and taken a bus to work, Laila watched Aziza wave good-bye and scuff along the wall in the orphanage back lot. She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

And the Mountains Echoed BY KHALED HOSSEINI

His little body convulsed in my arms with each sob.

always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

You know nothing of courage. said Baba Ayub. For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose. You have your life to lose, said the div. You already took that from me.

Sang div menggeram dan mengetuk-ngetuk dagu. Aku pernah mengambil banyak anak dari banyak ayh, katanya.

I miss Father, and Mother too, he croaked. And I miss Sasa and Rahim Khan sahib. But sometimes I'm glad they're not ... they're not here anymore. Why? I touched his arm. He drew back. Because-- he said, gasping and hitching between sobs, because I don't want them to see me... I'm so dirty. He sucked in his breath and let it out in a long, wheezy cry. I'm so dirty and full of sin.

Khaled Hosseini

I tried to conjure Ali's frozen face, to REALLY see his tranquil eyes, but time can be a greedy thing - sometimes it steals all the details for itself.

The wars had made fathers a rare commodity in Afghanistan.