Quotes About Loss

When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they're still coming.

More business is lost every year through neglect than through any other cause.

But how true it is that every pleasure has also its reverse side, in brief, its pain. Or, if not wholly true, how nearly so. Therefore, I have added to most of my pleasures the little flavour of bitterness, the flaw in their perfection, the canker in the damask, the worm at the root, the fear of loss, or of satiety, the fearful risks involved in their very existence, which tang their sweetness, and mind us of their mortality and of our own, and that nothing in this world is perfect.

I did have a beautiful life. It ended early, that's all.

When you almost lose something, you have to touch it often to reassure yourself it's still there.

Two hundred generations of European Jews. All gone, just as if they'd never been. It was the first time it was really real for me--just as if I were standing at the top of a ladder and somebody yanked the ladder away--and I was still standing there, only now it was *possible* to fall, because all my connections had been cut away, and there I was looking down into empty space, thinking about how I'd come this close to just not existing at all.

Svetlana felt that something had changed in her. "Some inner line of demarcation" had been drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry.

Svetlana was moved when her son, Joseph, kissed the body on the forehead to say good-bye.

I keep trying to bring back what is gone, the sunny, bygone years of my childhood," she would write over thirty years later, as if acknowledging the impossibility of this.40 From the child's point of view, the world may have been undiluted sun, though with a child's intuition, she must already have sensed the cracks in her paradise. From an adult perspective, it was a labyrinthine tangle of pain and

My husband's death changed my nature. I feel it impossible to be silent and tolerant anymore. It is impossible to be always a slave.

Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a young girl who knew Anne, commented, "There it took superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation-well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister's death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.

They were sitting on a small bench near the Kropotkin Gate when Svetlana mentioned the subject of suicide. Sinyavsky replied, "A suicide only thinks that he is killing himself. He is killing only his body, and the soul after that languishes, for God alone can take the soul."3 Svetlana may have remembered Grandmother Olga's words: "You will know your soul when it aches.

A soft gust of wind swooped at them under the hornbeam branches, setting the shadows flurrying, and when it died into the grass, Randal laid Bevis' body down, with a stunned emptiness inside him as though something of himself had gone too.

But tonight, because Rome had fallen and Felix was dead, because of Valerius's shame, the empty hut seemed horribly lonely, and there was a small aching need in him for somebody to notice, even if they were not glad, that he had come home.

it looked as if we were all connected by my husband's suicide, it was in fact love which connected us.

Suicide doesn't end pain; it multiplies it exponentially and transfers it to those who loved you.

I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.

Some things I can never forget. I must not. Otherwise what do I have left?

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.

Death preserves an ideal.

They had lived and known glory, and then they were ddead. She was alive and they were not, and nothing but a heartbeat separated her from them

almost forgotten him. In her hours

The Gideon Bible was dog-eared. I opened it to its yellow silk marker and saw that Genesis 23:4 had been snipped out.