Quotes About Loss

I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.

Grief causes suffering and disease.

They said their sufferings were great on the passage, and several of their number had died.

But in practice, if often comes down to not suffering a loss as big as the huge gain you made a while ago.

Death remains about the one certain fact in the lives of each one of us, and there will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week.

In high school, I had two friends that were suffering from cancer. I would go and sing for them while they were in hospital, and I sang at their services after they passed.

I have been suffering for so long and didn't even recognize it. I just stopped doing so many things that I used to love to do due to my pain.

You can really examine the suffering and consequences that happen when there's a loss in a family.

My own journey in becoming a poet began with memory - with the need to record and hold on to what was being lost. One of my earliest poems, 'Give and Take,' was about my Aunt Sugar, how I was losing her to her memory loss.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans experienced evolutionary benefits from brain developments that included aversion to loss and risk and from instincts for cooperation that helped strengthen communities.

A publisher friend of mine suggested that I write a book about my grandfather, who had just died. I had nothing else to fill my empty days with, so I started work on this book. While researching it - watching lots of movies, talking to moviemakers - I became interested in movies and started making documentaries.

Suicide is not an answer, it's destruction.

Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.

When my wife passed, I stopped doing interviews and I stopped doing meet-and-greets, mostly because I sort of became this suicide ambassador. Everybody wanted to tell me their story.

I lose my bags all the time. Sometimes for two months. One of the worst times was when I had come from France and I had packed cheese, because I was really crazy about camembert, so I have this really nice suit that stinks of camembert, no matter how many times I dry clean it.

I do have a very deep sense of regret that there was a conflict and that people lost their lives, and you know, many were responsible for that - and a lot of them wear pinstripe suits in London today.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

After my father died, we went to church for a long time every day, and then every other day during the summer.

I had to move out of my home in New York when I was 13. I left all my friends, family, my dogs, and summer camp... all that stuff behind. I moved out to L.A. with my mom and brother. That was difficult for me. I think the hardest part was seeing all my friends graduate without me and go to college.

My father blamed me for my brother Gunther's death, for not bringing him home. He died in an avalanche as we descended from the summit of Nanga Parbat, one of the 14 peaks over 8,000m, in 1970. Gunther and I did so much together. It was difficult for my father to understand what it was like up there.

The Gospel having spread itself into Persia, the pagan priests, who worshipped the sun, were greatly alarmed, and dreaded the loss of that influence they had hitherto maintained over the people's minds and properties.

To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

Mum died on a Saturday - apparently that's quite common. Dad already had dementia, and my brother and I had to let him know the news. Forty-five minutes later we had to tell him again. We spent the whole of that Sunday reminding him over and over.

Religion was quite a thing in our house - we were Baptists. Some Sundays I went to church three times. If there was a talk on missionary work in the afternoon, I could be there all bloody day. But religion took its first big knock after Dad died.