Quotes About Loss

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back. Through the panel he calls, "I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come." He pauses, fumbling to translate. "The song, light of the moon?" She almost smiles.

The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115

It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.

Knock him on the head with the umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife? Scream. Die. Papa.

You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.

If only she had brought her novel down with her.

Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. "it's so big," she whispers. "You can do this, Marie." She cannot.

his heart laced with regret.

split by the knobs of her vertebrae. She used to fall asleep holding his index finger in her fist. She used to sprawl with her books beneath the key pound bench and move her hands like spiders across the pages. "Am I to stay here?" "With Madame. And Etienne." He hands her a towel and helps her climb onto the tile and waits outside

Does she grieve over his absence? Or has she calcified her feelings, protected herself, as he is learning to do?

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.

Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right.

Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.

Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.

In the days following, he can hardly manage to comb his hair or convince his fingers to button his coat. His mind plays tricks, too: he walks into a room and forgets why he's there. He stares at a superior and forgets what the man just said.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct

Everybody has misplaced someone

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it...or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become....How much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

All of it burning. Every memory he ever made. Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear. The Milky Way a fading river. He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.

push back the hood of grief...

from Volkheimer to Werner.

All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made.