Quotes About Loss

After clearing the land, planting the orchard, building the house and barn, and surviving the Great Depression, our father died suddenly one winter night when we were small, leaving us to learn about loss before we even knew its name.

I always remember my dad's blue overalls and the blue overcoat he wore in winter, and I remember my mum's big old Afro. Sometimes, though, in my memories, smudges have replaced their faces.

There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens.

We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.

Although in my life the level of loss has never reached the extremes it does in 'The Winter People,' I certainly can identify with being both a daughter longing for her mother and being a mother who is almost scared by the intensity of her love for her daughter.

I remember my dad took my ice skates. One day I asked my mum: 'Where are my ice skates?' because I loved to skate in the winter. And she said through tears: 'Dad is selling them now... we don't have money for this week.'

Pink was my mother's favourite colour. Since her passing four years ago, I have envisaged an almond grove with thick clusters of pink, in celebration of her life and as a gentle reminder, during the darkest winter days, that kinder seasons lie ahead.

My Dad, a small-town lawyer, was also named Paul. Until we lost him when I was 16, he was a gentle presence in my life. I like to think he'd be proud of me and my sister and brothers, because I'm sure proud of him and of where I come from, Janesville, Wisconsin.

We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.

If people can't acknowledge the wisdom of indigenous cultures, then that's their loss.

I talk a lot about the men in my family because my mother died when I was little, and my grandmother died when my aunts were little, so we didn't have those kinds of heads of household. But all the members of our household who were female were sort of living as equal and as wise as the male figures in our family.

At the time I discovered that I had prostate cancer, it was not long after my first wife had died, so my children had lost their mum. I felt that to tell them that I had prostate cancer, while I knew that I had it and there was a threat of some sort, I felt that it would be wise not to make things worse for them.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

My father died five days before I returned to New York. He was only fifty-three years old. My parents and my father's doctor had all decided it was wiser for me to go to South America than to stay home and see Papa waste away. For a long time, I felt an enormous sense of guilt about having left my father's side when he was so sick.

I wish my father had lived longer. He died when I was 18.

Maybe sometimes, when I see some kids, you know, with their families. It's making me cry. You know, maybe when I ask them, sometimes, like, 'How does it feel to have a dad?' And, you know, they tell me this great answers, and sometimes I wish my dad was here.

With 'Smoke Signals,' the character was so much like me growing up. I lost my parents, and I wish I'd had an opportunity to find out where they were. So I was reflecting on how I grew up, that feeling of abandonment. That whole film was a reality that I always held back and kept to myself.

My son died from cancer. My granddaughter died from cancer. I have a lot of reasons to think that reality is not a friendly neighborhood. And the stories that I tell distract me, and if I do the job right, they distract people from things that are happening to them that they wish had never happened.

After eight years of fighting, and multiple rounds of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, my mother lost her battle with cancer. I think about her every day. I miss her terribly, and wish she were there to walk me down the aisle at my wedding and to cheer when my sister received her college diploma.

It was tragic every single time my mom told me we were moving. I would always envy my friends who had grown up in the same house their entire life, and they had markings on the wall of 'me at five years old' and all that. It made me so sad. I wished I'd had that.

I will miss my pal Dominick Dunne. I am sure his funeral will be just the sort of event he would have loved. Based on who will be there, I am sure he wishes he could have been there to cover it.

I think whenever you lose somebody close to you, there's always a part of you that wishes you could have done something differently.

One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone.

I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it; nor kept it without wishing I had given it away.