Quotes About Loss

They don't disappear, the dead. It'd be easier if they did. I can see her so clearly. If she walked up those steps now, part of me wouldn't be surprised. She was such a vivid person.

He left Della sitting in the darkness, a little drunk, with nothing else for company but the picture of the dead daughter she had never seen. Closing the front door, Strike couldn't remember the last time he had felt such a strange mixture of admiration, sympathy and suspicion.

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her.

He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed.

Even though he'd been craving solitude for the past ten days, the prospect of his silent attic room was cheerless, after these long days of dread and loss.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever – Sylvia Plath

He was alone now, and at a kind of peace. None of the affairs or one-night stands he'd had since Charlotte had touched the essential part of him. He'd sometimes wondered since whether Charlotte had not stunted his ability to feel deeply.

But none of us were ever quite the same afterward," said Dr. Gupta quietly. "One does not expect a friend to vanish into thin air without leaving a single trace behind them. There is something—uncanny about it.

An image of Charlotte hung permanently in Robin's head these days, like a shadowy portrait she'd never wanted hung . . . Last night, though, that image had become stark and fixed: a darkly romantic vision of a lost and dying love, breathing her final words in Strike's ear as she lay among the trees.

You lost a good friend and a wife within—what—months of each other?" "A few months, yes." "You were writing all through that time?" "Yes," said Fancourt, with an angry, condescending laugh, "I was writing all through that time. It's my profession. Would anyone ask you whether you were still in the army while you were having private difficulties?

He felt as though his capacity for loving had been blunted, the nerve endings severed. He

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike

The only other funeral she'd attended had been four years previously, when she and Strike had attended the cremation of a murdered girl in the course of their first murder investigation,

Forty years ago, but it feels like yesterday. They don't disappear, the dead. It'd be easier if they did. I can see her so clearly. If she walked up those steps now, part of me wouldn't be surprised. She was such a vivid person.

The only thing left to her keeping were a bloody old rag and a creased photograph of the ocean which she held pressed to the hollow of her slender throat and had thrashed for and bit hands to protect like a madwoman risen from sleep to in her unformed state between wake and dream reproach the world tenfold.

I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.

In times of grief, you're waiting for something to happen, but the thing you're waiting for has already taken place.

It's a sad thing to watch your best friend turn into somebody you don't know anymore. Or even want to know.

In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are-joy, tenderness, success beauty-but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don't love us, can never love us.

But there was no use. There was no point. It was just a story. It was just a story of people, of Ralph and Emilia and Antonio and Catherine and the mothers and the fathers who had died, too soon or late, of people who had hurt one another as much as people can do, who had been selfish and not wise, and had become trapped inside the bitter walls of memories they wished they had never had. It

She had no one in the world. Her whole world, what was left of it, was here, and there was no way to get back to where she had been before. The

She knew there were parts of the past you had to let go of, certain lands that were irredeemably lost, sorrowfully lost, but, finally, lost forever.

Why is it that, as we lose our loveliness, the sheen of youth, we lose possibility as well? We acquire, but more is vanished than is given, and nothing makes up for the loss of the swallows at the Sherry, or the Victoria diamond, or the nights at Area when your booted feet ground the glass phials of amyl nitrate into the dance floor.

They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.