Quotes About Loss

They woke together and fell apart.

If possessions are viewed as part of self, it follows that an unintentional loss of possessions should be regarded as a loss or lessening of self.

To someone who has not had a parent stolen from them, I can only attempt to explain how it feels. It's like having part of yourself hacked off without warning. Afterwards, they become like a phantom limb: you're sure they're still present because you can feel them, you communicate with them, but you just can't see them.

The stillness and silence shrouding Papá was the most complete I'd ever experienced. The silence came from where his breathing used to be. But it wasn't only his breathing that was missing. It was his presence.

Friendship is dead:They were friends who go with the wind,And the wind was blowing at my door.

What became of the friends I hadWith whom I was always so closeAnd loved so dearly?

Why did so many die in the night? As though they wished to kiss us and deliver us with sweet dreams before taking their leave of the world.

After the liberation, when the American Army freed me—I was working in a Nazi slave-labor camp—I went back to our home in Brno. I looked for my family. But they were all dead. Then I looked for the families of my friends. Judith, dear, it grieves me to tell you that your family, too, were all exterminated.

Twenty months. Six thousand dead. One out of every ten Jews dead on the battlefield. The nation born—like all births—in blood.

It had been an occasion for reminiscing, but there are limits. And so my childhood falls into a black hole.

Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it.

You break my sleep And something like my heart.

Collect yourself: to smother what you feel, recall to order, summon in one place; making, like Orpheus, a system against loss.

WILD ASTERS I am here to worship the blue asters along the brook; not to carry pollen on my legs, or rub strutted wings in mindless sucking; but to feel with my eyes the loss of you and me, not in the powdered mildew that spreads from leaf to leaf, but in the glorious absence of grief to see what was not meant to be seen, the clusters, the aggregate, the undenying multiplicity.

Every night passes grief-stricken, weeping.

Music is fragile: people die, and it's forgotten.

They carved your name into the stone and then they put it in the ground, I run my fingers through the grooves When no one's around

Ireland was a different place after the famine. The population was drastically reduced—an island of 8.2 million people in 1841 was reduced to 6 million in 1851. At least 1 million of those people had died. The rest fled the country, hoping for a new life in another land.

Within a week or two the calm returned between us, but something was missing. Dad could feel it, too. The first casualty of distrust, I learned, is familiarity. My father saw me as a slightly different person now.

For every just potential that go's unrealized, is a tragedy.

War: In every war there's victims and murderers, or murderers and murderers. Either way it go's nobody wins in a war, everybody loses in a war. The victims lose their lives and the murderers lose their innocence.

His gun was gone, not to mention his arm.

In all ten directions of the universe, there is only one truth. When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same. What can ever be lost? What can be attained? If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time. If we lose something, it is hiding somewhere near us.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.