Quotes About Loss

In the gravedigger scene in act V, Hamlet looks upon an anonymous skull and jokes that even Alexander the Great decomposed into dust that could have been used to plug a beer barrel. But when Hamlet is shown this skull of his old friend Yorick, the prince becomes unspeakably sentimental and sad because he knew him.

You can't miss what you don't remember ever having.

Going up, Herzong found a bouquet of violets, dropped from the hand of a woman. Perhaps a bride. Little perfume remained in them, but they made him remember... These violets smelled to him like female tears. He gave them a burial in the trash ca, hoping they had not dropped from a disappointed hand.

More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when they have the added torment of losing their humanity first, so that their death is a total defeat...

But in the end I said, 'It's terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation.

Well, you are a privileged character. You're the only man living whose mother lost her mind and died.

Yes, there are good reasons for revulsion and fear. But revulsion and fear impair judgment. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world—the world as it existed for that person.

Oh, death from what we do not want is the most common of all the causes.

At sixteen John escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, leaving behind his parents and his sister. They were killed. Everyone was killed. John somehow obtained Polish seaman's papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters. When the war ended he came to Israel via Cyprus

joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam, married, and had two children. His first wife died of cancer about ten years ago and he has married again. He says, "I ask myself in what ways my life has not been typical. For a Jew from Eastern Europe it has been completely typical—war, death of mother, death of father, death of sister, four years in disguise among the Germans, death of wife, death of son. Thirty years of hard work, planting and harvesting in the kibbutz. Nothing exceptional.

With her death and the remarriage of my father, the children scattered. I was turned loose—freed, in a sense: free but also stunned, like someone who survives an explosion but hasn't yet grasped what has happened. I didn't know anything. At the age of eighteen, I didn't even know that I was an adolescent. Words like that came later, in the forties and fifties.

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces.

The forecast is we kiss goodbye and never hello all kisses are then parting kisses

The girl was holding out her hand, but I could only give a pathetic shrug. I had nothing to give her. I'd finally faded away.

That was us.' I told him we were the kids who'd caused the Burneys' deaths.

If I tell you, will you let met go? - You bet, partner. [...] - You promised! - Nope. I said you bet. You did ... and you lost.

That is one of the tragedies of aging, appreciating how many good and interesting people have passed by unknown.

That letter was your whole future, you daft prince. It was my past. I lost that the night my parents died. But I found you, Deryn. Maybe I wasn't meant to end the war, but I was meant to find you. I know that. You've saved me from having any reason to keep going. We save each other. That's how it works.

Dying is one of those things that can't be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.

I love my virginity to the apocalypse.

You don't know what it's like, when your best friend disappears.

Rex lost his specs.

Fuzzy Tally is no more.