Quotes About Loss

You can't miss what you never had. And definitely not what you don't understand.

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had. Warren Lasher Ed Rubberhead Catapano Charles Deats or Keats Alfonse Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make mislaid jokes to yourself. Make another list.

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said Fuck it and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much.

It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.

Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.

I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.

Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp. Slam the door like Bette Davis. Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.

Biri sizden ayr?ld???nda tüm çekiciliÄŸinizi kaybedersiniz ve kar?? taraf?n yeni bir baÅŸlang?ç yaparken size dair beslediÄŸi tüm kuÅŸkular böylece kan?tlanm?? olur.

You reach a point," she wrote me once, "where you cannot cry anymore, and you look around you at people you know, at people your own age, and they're not crying either. Something has been taken. And they are emptier. And they are grateful.

When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.

Someday, like everybody, this man you truly love like no other is going to die. No matter how much you love him, you cannot save him. No matter how much you love: nothing, no one, lasts.

And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.

But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.

Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can't see because you don't have your glasses on.

What is beautiful is seized, my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. It came to me in bulky bandages, seeming much larger, much more than it really was.

What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse.

Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone.

She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them.

At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn't reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling resemblance, a thin and charming twin, which you took home with you to fatten and cradle, nuzzle and scold.

No, I'm not Jewish, she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: Are you? Yes, he said. He studied her eyes. Oh, she said. Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I'd ask. Yes. She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn't had been taken away, legally, by the police.

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science.