Quotes About Loss

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

It's true that he didn't kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.

Bal, she whispered, her forehead resting against his chest as the seconds counted away. The only power I'd wish for is the power to turn back time.

things had once stood between them. That had gone for ever, she knew, and in its place there was a terrible sense of loss that sometimes threatened to overwhelm

was the one who was left behind who did most of the missing.

As for those who state that it is thanks to a woman, the Lady Eve, that man was expelled from paradise, my answer to them would be that man has gained far more through Mary than he ever lost through Eve.'

time is of all losses the most irrecuperable, for it can never be redeemed.

DSM definitions do not include personal and contextual factors such as whether the depressive symptoms are an understandable response to loss, a terrible life situation, psychological conflict or personality factors.

What came is gone forever every time

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

Trees scream and drop bright leaves

Banks burn, boys die bullet-eyed, mothers scream realization the vast tonnage of napalm

Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss, I float over the vomiter thrilled with my deathlessness, thrilled with this endlessness I dice and bury, come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.

You can't go back. You can't have what was stolen. Just forget...

Zach," I said as I lay there "Where did you go? When you were looking for me?" I shifted in his arms, looked into his eyes. "Crazy." His voice was a whisper against my skin. "I went crazy.

t's all going … Darkness is gathering me into its arms. Farewell wife, children, family, the things of my heart … Farewell me, cherished me, now so hazy, so indistinct...

We wore that grief like one wears one's underclothes. An invisible skin, unseen to prying eyes, but knitted to us all the same. We wore it every day.

All paradises are there to be expelled from.

It was clear: if you were wealthy, you were safe. I'd seen how the summer kids seemed braver than me, reckless, and now I knew why. They could dive off anything, because underneath them was an invisible net of parents, doctors, coaches, teachers, money. If they fell, they had Cape Cod Concierge. If we had been rich, Mack would be alive.

Beneath their wary smiles, the people were warm and friendly. They had known sorrow and loss, but their spirit survived.

JEALOUS, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed

Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.

In many instances nothing marked the spot where lay the vestiges of some poor mortal-who, leaving a large circle of sorrowing friends, had been left by them in turn-except a depression in the earth, more lasting than that in the spirits of the mourners.