Quotes About Loss

Mostly I thought of Martha, who she was and what she had done for me. There wasn't a moment of my life that I didn't owe to her. Sometimes it rendered me listless and sad, made me say no to the frat party, the Sunday-night pizza feast, the Spring Fling, and I'd hole up alone in my dorm, drawing or writing lyrics, left with the painful truth of it, how the people who change us are the ones we never saw clearly at all, not until they were gone.

I miss him every single day, he said. I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don't understand you at all stick around.

was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upwards, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous

Look around. It's almost gone. If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.

The Key to Paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their keys around their necks.

Nothing's worse than saying goodbye. It's a little like dying.

Hue had become a city of the dead.

And while each death would echo loudly halfway around the world, hurling families and even whole communities into grief, often with shattering consequences for generations, in Hue there wasn't even time to stop and look, much less grieve.

When he got back to Phu Bai, one of the walking wounded, he was ordered to look through nearly a hundred body bags and identify those he recognized. It took him two days to complete the job, unzipping the bags and looking at the pale, lifeless faces.

The Americans landed in Vietnam, were killed in Vietnam, and others have continued to come here without having good reasons.

the final toll of the Battle of Hue numbers well over ten thousand, making it by far the bloodiest of the Vietnam War.

Have you been reading anything in the paper about Hue? It is supposed to be big news in the states. Well that's where I am. It is supposed to be some of the worst fighting that has been fought in the war. If it isn't it will be plenty for me. I can't really say how bad it has been. We've lost a hell of a lot of people. . . . This house to house fighting is a son of a bitch. I've never been so scared in all my life.

In such a dry spell, when advertisers were beginning to question circulation figures, and editors were racking their brains for a strong hate symbol to create interest, the delayed report from Eden came as a summer shower, that might be magnified into a flood. EDEN SILENT quickly became COLONY FEARED LOST and progressed normally to COLONY WIPED OUT.

In such a dry spell, when advertisers were beginning to question circulation figures, and editors were racking their brains for a strong hate symbol to create interest, the delayed report from Eden came as a summer shower, that might be magnified into a flood. EDEN SILENT quickly became COLONY FEARED LOST and progressed normally to COLONY WIPED OUT. That there was no proof of loss or destruction bothered no one in journalism.

Job learned about the vanity of this world by losing it all; the Teacher {Qoheleth} saw it by having it all. (The Message of the Old Testament, p. 536)

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid.

And one of the friends died of fear that very nice and the other two were broken men for the rest of their lives.

He is the only man she has ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made.

What would your mother think about that?" which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can't say anything to people who are dead and dead people can't think.

Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.

Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.

How just it would be if for our final reward we were to be made the masters of time, and if those we love could come alive again not just in memory, but in truth.

Sometimes love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road.