Quotes About Loss

He was part of us and when he died all the actions stopped dead, and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. i've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million actions the night he passed on. 

The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

The entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can't have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

The girl who had known the weather and never been burnt by fireflies, the girl who had known what dandelions meant rubbed off on your chin. Then, she would be gone.

The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.

Death makes everything else sad. But death itself only scares. If there wasn't death, all the other things wouldn't get tainted.

Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible--the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.

No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other's Fate, For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair No countryfar enough to hide your loss.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again

Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized she'd never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death.

We never burned right.

and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. How

She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.

Life gives us everything. Then it takes it away. Youth, love, happiness, friends. Darkness gets it all in the end.

He had once been a wanderer of libraries and a lover of the finest literature in history. But when real life diminished him, when friends died, when a love failed, when there were too many deaths and accidents surrounding him, he discovered that his faith in books had failed because they could not help him when he needed the help. Turning on them, he lit a match.

About this grass now. I didn't finish telling. It grows so close it's guaranteed to kill off clover and dandelions- Great God in heaven! That means no dandelion wine next year! That means no bees crossing our lot! You're out of your mind, son

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, . . .

That's life for you, said McDunn. Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can hurt you no more.

What did you give to the city, Montag? Ashes. What did the others give to each other? Nothingness.

No, said the old man, deep under. I don't remember anyone winning anywhere any time. War's never a winning things, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns. But I don't suppose that's the kind of victory you boys mean for me to talk on.

Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness.

Is death being on a ship sailing and all your folks left back on the shore?