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Quotes About Loss

It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.
~ Louise Erdrich
She died instantly, said Kateri, implying she'd not had time to use a bookmark.
~ Louise Erdrich
Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?
~ Louise Erdrich
Eliza's death, far from putting the whole situation to rest, only inflamed John's feelings anew, complicating his stormy relationship with his father.
~ Ron Chernow
In a little more than two years, they had suffered their father's disappearance and their mother's death, reducing them to orphans and throwing them upon the mercy of friends, family, and community.
~ Ron Chernow
Senior countered that "the prestige of his going to Hot Springs for twenty-one days as our family physician Ã¢â'¬Â¦ might be worth a great deal more to him than this loss of patients.
~ Ron Chernow
Frank could never curb his compulsive gambling.
~ Ron Chernow
Since Hamilton had at least one sibling who had died in infancy or childhood, the poem may have summoned up memories of his own mother's hardships: For the sweet babe, my doting heart Did all a mother's fondness feel; Careful to act each tender part And guard from every threatening ill. But what alas! availed my care? The unrelenting hand of death, Regardless of a parent's prayer Has stopped my lovely infant's breath
~ Ron Chernow
and Junius desperately bought them to prop up the price, nearly wiping himself out.
~ Ron Chernow
If it is a failure, I will take the loss.
~ Ron Chernow
The lift of her heart she'd felt on the outcrop she now felt again, and it wasn't just love. She'd felt love before, known its depths when her mother died. This was something rarer. Happiness, Laurel thought, that must be what this is.
~ Ron Rash
The song was wistful as the ballads Slidell and the Clayton brothers played, except words weren't needed to feel the yearning. That made the music all the more sorrowful, because this song wasn't about one lost love or one dead child or parent. It was as if the music was about every loss that had ever been.
~ Ron Rash
Something Rich and Strange She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now.
~ Ron Rash
Rachel felt the grief grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she'd never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it.
~ Ron Rash
It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. And now this brown-eyed child. Don't love it, Rachel told herself. Don't love anything that can be taken away.
~ Ron Rash
all the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren't sure that you could.
~ Ron Rash
The Release In those last moments before the platter of salt and dirt lay on his stomach, wax-light had waved across a mute heart, his son waited by the bed. Raised to believe the soul left the body with its last breath, he listened for death's rattle, then pressed his lips like a kiss to his father's lips, and took into his mouth the breath that had given him breath, a life distilled to one stir of air soft as moth wings against palms, held a moment, then let go.
~ Ron Rash
Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they'd died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.
~ Ron Rash
can't watch her die," he told her. "I just can't." He waited on the porch till it was over.
~ Ron Rash
It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.
~ Ron Rash
If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
~ Ronald Reagan
Remember that every government service, every offer of government - financed security, is paid for in the loss of personal freedom... In the days to come, whenever a voice is raised telling you to let the government do it, analyze very carefully to see whether the suggested service is worth the personal freedom which you must forgo in return for such service.
~ Ronald Reagan
Just think how happy you'd be if you lost everything you have right now & then got it back.
~ Ronald Reagan
Last color bleeds from the trees, the slow drip of rain, collapsing. The feverish maples decline. We pause to pick mushrooms, stick into our sacks these squat, warty, beige and tan hammers, these spongy plungers and rams, these alien, faceless denizens of damp. They are not in our book. As we walk through this flaccid rain, this vague sense of loss and wrong, we don't talk. But we wonder about maples and mushrooms, about us: Anything you can't name is dangerous.
~ Ronald Wallace