Quotes About Loss

Such is the power of death -- to strip away breath and transform a person into an airy abstraction.

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

I discover that it is possible to be angry with someone who has died. It is possible to hate yourself for being angry with someone who has died. It is possible to believe that you will die from grief, that somehow your breathing will catch itself up and simply stop. It is possible to believe that you could have stopped the terrible thing that happened at any time, if only you had known.

The beauty makes her miss Aidan with an ache that feels unbearable. she replays the night they had together, moment by moment. Will she spend her life missing him?

to talk at length about her mother and father, whom she has not seen since their deaths in the late 1800s. The greatest insight to emerge from those sessions was that Etna

She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.

It's more that I'm afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I'm supposed to be… to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I'm afraid of what I'll miss.

She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.

I killed her once and died for her many times and I still have nothing to show for it. I always search for her ; I always remember her. I carry the hope that someday she will remember me.

Ruins stood for what was lost, and yet there were beautiful-peaceful, historic, intellectual. Not tragic or regrettable. Lena tried to keep hers that way too, and she succeeded to some extent. Why not celebrate what you had rather than spend your time mourning its passing? There could be joy in things that ended.

Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must.

There were certain qualities you possessed carelessly. And you couldn't retrieve them when they were gone. The very act of caring made them impossible to regain.

I killed her once and died for her many times

She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.

People left a lot of things behind when they went in the water. Their clothes, their stuff, their makeup, their fixed-up hair, their voices, their hearing, their sight—at least as the normally experienced them.

It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.

She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.

Bridget cried for the leavers and the left. For the people, like herself, grimly forsaking what precious gifts they would ever get.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

What Daniel taketh away, Daniel giveth.

They needed to grieve alone was what Tibby's dad said. Lena wondered if really there was any choice in that. Everyone grieved alone.

She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew.

The forgetting and having to remember again was the very worst part.

Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.