Quotes About Loss

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

Hayat satranç gibidir. On parçan? kaybedip yine de kazanabilirsin...

We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and out of that wanting - well, everything else rises, good and bad. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are looking for the lost half minute.

What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.

Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended.

Of all men who graduated from Oxford in 1913, 31 percent were killed.

more than 35 percent of all German men who were between the ages of 19 and 22 when the fighting broke out, for example, were killed in the next four and a half years, and many of the remainder grievously wounded. For France, the toll was proportionately even higher: one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 at the war's outbreak were dead when it was over.

Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over—nearly two casualties for every yard of the front. Nineteen thousand were killed, most of them within the attack's first disastrous hour, and some 2,000 more who were badly wounded would die in hospitals later.

So many engineers were seized that factories came to a halt; so many railway men died that some trains did not run; so many colonels and generals were shot that the almost leaderless Red Army was nearly crushed by the German invasion of 1941.

No one can know, of course, accurate population figures from an era before there was a census, but many officials on the ground at the time and later historians, demographers, and anthropologists have made estimates of great loss.

John Kipling is still among the more than 400,000 British Empire dead from 1914–1918 whose resting place is not known.

As Sanford saw his inherited fortune draining away, his connections at the Belgian court loomed larger for him.

both sides together suffered another half a million dead and wounded just during the war's final five weeks.

On this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2,738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8,000 wounded.

Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth's barrier.

recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love;

For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life's central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren't for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family's turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper. A little beef and bingo at the Nugents'.

Deader than a coffin nail, because a coffin nail is still performing useful work, and so in one sense is as alive as it's ever been. Dead as hope. Dead as our financial affairs. Gone.

But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood.

Time takes life away and gives us memory...

I could write a guidebook about this city, this fallen city. Street by street, house by house, church by church. What happened in this building, who was betrayed, and by whom, in this apartment, who waited for whom on this street corner. And why the person never came.

I ran over without a word, cradled PLT tenderly in my arms and carried her upstairs. Placing her on my own bed, I wrapped my mortally wounded pet in my best school scarf and lay down next to her. It was a night of grief I have never forgotten.