Quotes About Loss

present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.

Com efeito, o presente é tudo de que se pode ser privado: afinal, tudo o que se tem é o presente, e a perda daquilo que não se possui não é possível.

hundred, or in an infinite period; ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

The present moment is equal for all; so what is passing is equal also; the loss therefore turns out to be the merest fragment of time. No one can lose either the past or the future – how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess?

Second, that both the longest-lived and the earliest to die suffer the same loss. It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if indeed this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.

Acuérdate siempre que no se pierde otra vida que la que se vive y que solo se vive la que se pierde. Así­ la mas larga vida y la mas corta vienen a reducirse a lo mismo. El momento presente que se vive es igual para todos el que se pierde lo es también, y este que se pierde llega a parecernos indivisible. Y es que no se pierde el pasado ni el futuro, pues lo que no poseemos ¿Cómo puede sernos arrebatado

My thoughts always go back to the parents – here's their kid who wouldn't be coming back. I got this feeling all the way through. It didn't matter if I saw a dead American or German, I always figured he belonged to somebody. You knew somebody was going to miss him. - Forrest Guth

William Sloane Coffin said when his son Alex died in a car wreck at the age of twenty-four. Ten days later, Coffin delivered Alex's eulogy at Riverside Church in New York City, where he was senior minister. Among many other things, he said this:

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow. I'm heartless, I thought. Therefore I'm homeless.

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.

All it takes," said Crake, "is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever.

I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.

The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

Her glass wings are gone.

Strange how we decorate pain. These ribbons, for instance, and the small hard teardrops of blood. Who are they for? Do we think the dead care?

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

It's the end of the world every day, for someone.

In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere.

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers