Quotes About Loss

was alone with my father when it happened, a quiet death, with no complaints. He told me I was the light of his life and that I must look after my mother when he was gone. Afterward, I sat beside him and wept.

I would watch his footprints when he went and mourn him before he was gone.

That was history, in his opinion: that sorrow was unalterable and ever present. That tears could be preserved in the hardest granite.

Everything she loved had already happened and had already been.

I would only understand her grief when my child caused me my own.

Neki ljudi znaju to?an trenutak kad su sve izgubili. Mogu se vratiti u prošlost i vidjeti to jasno kao na dlanu, ali ni za živu glavu ne mogu shvatiti zašto to nisu primijetili dok se doga?alo.

If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your

History was easy: the past with all loss burned out of it, all sorrow worn out of it—all that was merely personal comfortably removed

And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms around her father's neck. "There went the tree," he said.

Like exiles, their delight was not in where they now found themselves but in whatever they could remember about the place, and the time, they had abandoned.

But now as she watched her cousin's husband . . . , the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

Billy had drunk himself to death. He had, at some point, ripped apart, plowed through, as alcoholics tend to do, the great, deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room.

The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?

Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.

Gradually, she realizes how she is forced to look for distraction when she is moved, upset, or sad. (When a six-year-old's mother died, his aunt told him: "You must be brave; don't cry;

fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self that results from denial.

And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness.

Gradually, she realizes how she is forced to look for distraction when she is moved, upset, or sad. (When a six-year-old's mother died, his aunt told him: "You must be brave; don't cry; now go to your room and play nicely")

In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood, manifested as the total alienation from the self in the adult.

Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead.

Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self - my old, devious, ironic, isolated self - beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.

I actually had a long career as a flirt ahead of me. It's quite a natural behaviour, once the loss of love makes you give up your ideas of marriage.

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

You know one reason I know he's not dead?' said Sonje. 'I don't dream about him.