Quotes About Loss

One year, thought Kristin, and she could hardly remember when she had last given Arne a thought. It gave her a fright—maybe she was a loose, vile woman. A year since she had seen him lying on the bier in the death chamber, when she thought she would never be happy again. She whimpered silently in fear at the inconstancy of her own heart and at the transitory nature of all things. Erlend, Erlend—would he forget her? But worse yet was that she might ever forget him.

I wasn't just seasick; I was undone in sorrow.

We note our place with bookmarkers That measure what we've lost.

I still think about him all the time. I just sobbed for an age when I found the note I wrote about his death buried in my computer.

She was adamant, and she was right, that all we can do is try to carry on. To accept. To incorporate death, grief and memory into our lives. People we love never leave us. They should never leave us.

In a blink of a life my brother James, mother and I lost a vital part of our tiny family. We were devastated. I felt completely bereft. And then 9/11 happened. And I had written the only book in the world about the group behind the devastating attack.

worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out.

The remains of sixty thousand young seamen now lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More men had died there in the five years of the Second World War than in all of the conflicts in the ocean since the first Romans had set out on their invading expeditions nearly two thousand years before.

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

For Zaza If there are tears in my eyes tonight, is it because you are no longer alive, or because I am? I should dedicate this story to you, but I know that you no longer exist anywhere, and my writing to you like this is pure literary artifice. In any case, this isn't really your story, only one inspired by us. You were not Andrée; nor was I Sylvie, who speaks in my name.

As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light—it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it.

For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.

Avevo perduto la sicurezza dell'infanzia; in cambio non avevo guadagnato niente.

Toute expérience de perte produit une brisure mais par la grâce de la littérature cette brisure peut se transformer en lien.

Para mí, mi madre siempre había existido y nunca había pensado seriamente que la vería desaparecer un día cercano. Su fin se situaba, como su nacimiento, en un tiempo mítico. Cuando yo me decía: tiene edad de morir, eran palabras vacías, como tantas otras. Por primera vez percibía en mi madre un cadáver en cierne.

Pour moi, ma mère avait toujours existé et je n'avais jamais sérieusement pensé que je la verrais disparaître un jour, bientôt. Sa fin se situait, comme sa naissance, dans un temps mystique. Quand je me disais : elle a l'âge de mourir, c'étaient des mots vides, comme tant de mots. Pour la première fois, j'apercevais en elle un cadavre en sursis.

I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him. That evening, for the very reason that the surroundings were the same, the old image, coming into contact with a flesh and blood man smoking a cigarette, fell to dust and ashes, I had a shattering revelation: time goes by. I began to weep.

after Neruda a bronze song, something undone, salvia, a crushed butterfly. It is the blood on a light bulb, the seventh sadness, a fluctuation that closes oceans and eyes. The vermilion and solitary luminary shimmies and singes the feathers of the aviary. Moon, the clock's word, dear mother, ruin, rain. — Simone Muench, "Elegy for the Unsaid," Lampblack & Ash: Poems . (Sarabande Books; First Edition edition November 1, 2005)

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Nous ne possédons rien au monde - car le hasard peut tout nous ôter - sinon le pouvoir de dire je

You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything is lost.

Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.