Quotes About Loss

It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

We are never so vulnerable as when we love, and never so hopelessly unhappy as when we lose the object of our love.

If one of us should die, then I shall move to Paris.

Niemals sind wir ungeschützter gegen das Leiden, als wenn wir Lieben. Niemals hilfloser unglücklich, als wenn wir das geliebte Objekt oder seine Liebe verloren haben.

Pain is thus the actual reaction to loss of object, while anxiety is the reaction to the danger which that loss entails and, by a further displacement, a reaction to the danger of the loss of object itself.

I don't want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you. It's a cliche, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial - people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who were very good with words - the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.

What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.

How good is his memory? If very good, as dogs' memories are said to be, what grief being locked up alone might bring him. And - heart-shredding thought - is it still for you that he waits by the door?)

I think of the story of Hachik? the Akita, who used to go to Tokyo's Shibuya Station to meet the train that brought his master home from work every day—until one day the man died suddenly and Hachik? waited in vain. But the next day, and every day after that, for nearly ten years, the dog appeared at the station to meet the train at the usual hour.

It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don't want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.

When did she plant the roses. In full magnificent bloom now, the red and the white. A fragrance to make you go, Aaah. I think how much they must have pleased her, year after year, and made her proud. And it's not the thought that she must miss them, but that she's no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad.

Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it. Like people whose memories of places they've traveled to are in fact only memories of the pictures they took there. In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve of it. So it could happen: by writing about someone lost—or even just talking too much about them—you might be burying them for good.

To draw me out, the therapist asks what I did for the holidays. When I tell him he says gently (he says everything gently), Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting to be with other people. Hating to be with other people, I don't say. Terrified of being with other people.

But that's what age is, isn't it? Slo-mo castration.

Since I first heard about your death, haven't I often felt like someone living with one foot in madness. Early on, there were times when I would find myself somewhere without remembering how I got there, when I'd leave home on some errand only to forget what it was.

Unlike when a young person commits suicide, which could never be anything but a mistake.

Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo - beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo - I will wake one morning to find him gone and you in his place, back from the land of the dead?

The exhaustion of mourning was my thought.

What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.

If I bring him home though, I swear he'll spend the rest of his life waiting by the door. And he deserves better than that, don't you think?' Yes, I think, my heart breaking. You can't explain death. And love deserves better than that.

And it's not the thought that she must miss them, but that she's no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad. What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.

And just because there are other people who've lost someone to suicide doesn't mean that what I'm feeling is something that can be shared.

One day we were planning our future, she said, the next day he was gone. At first I thought I owed it to him to do everything possible to try to understand. But I came to believe this was wrong. He had chosen silence. His death was a mystery. In the end I decided I should leave him his silence. His mystery.

talk about the times I see you. Each time my heart turns over. But why should it be that almost always the person I mistake for you is someone who looks like you not at the age when you died but at some other stage of your life.