Quotes About Loss

When the dead are done with the living," Franny said to me, "the living can go on to other things.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

Buckley kept the shoe on his dresser, until one day it wasn't there anymore and no amount of looking for it could turn it up.

greatest hope. Last night it had been my father who'd

In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn't. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.

All of them are gone except for me.. And for me.. Nothing is gone.

When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out. Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.

I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.

Mrs. Casey, do you love Christmas? Well you know, she answered reflectively, Christmas can be a sad time for people too. It's a remembering time for us older ones. We remember the people who are gone. Oh, I never thought of that, I told her in surprise. Well that's youth for you, she said; you don't start to look back over your shoulder until there is something to look back at, and around Christmas I tend to think of the Christmases past and the people gone with them.

The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory

And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

Even as I hold you I think of you as someone gone far, far away. Your eyes the color of pennies in a bowl of dark honey bringing sweet light to someone else your black hair slipping through my fingers is the flash of your head going around a corner your smile, breaking before me, the flippant last turn of a revolving door, emptying you out, changed, away from me. Even as I hold you I am letting go.

World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost.

T}here is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart.

There's no return from this, no way we will ever come back together again. She tried to accept this clarity as a gift.

I'm thinking of the moment something dies and how we instinctively know it. And of how we try not to know what we know because we do not yet understand how we are to negotiate change.

The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.

Trying to believe his story kilt her.

Spanish moss draggled bloody to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall.

in the beginning she'd felt bereft, to have been shown so much and to have been patiently taught so much, and then to feel it evaporate. But she'd realized the teachings simply became a part of her. They became hers.