Quotes About Loss

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life.

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses.

When I saw him three months later, he was still despondent. "I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered," he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes were rimmed red. He had one great solace, however: that she hadn't suffered, that she'd got to spend her last few weeks in peace at home in the warmth of their long love, instead of up on a nursing floor, a lost and disoriented patient. *

two months before he left the hospital. Weak and debilitated, he lost his limousine business and his home

As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses." Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

When I saw him three months later [after the death of his wife], he was still despondent. 'I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered,' he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes rimmed red.

she began to lose her appetite, and strong odors became intolerable.

Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

Emily, who loved her best friend so much she still cannot listen to the records they once enjoyed together, and it is five years already since her friend died.

I don't know how long I looked for Toni every day at noontime, sitting on the stoop. Eventually, her image receded into that place from which all my dreams are made.

Our dead line our dreams, their deaths becoming more and more commonplace.

I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world's cruelty that destroys its own young in passing—not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction.

Death folds the corners of my mouth into a heart-shaped star. It sits on my tongue like a stone around which your name blossoms distorted. — Audre Lorde, from "Speechless," The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde . (W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition February 17, 2000)

Grief stays with a person for a long time.

Why wouldn't you talk to us Little Sister? I tried, Little Sister says. I did. But my voice was lost in sadness.

I seen a man grab hold to a fellow and cut off his arm. Cut it off at the shoulder. He had to work at it a while...but he cut it clean off. The man looked down saw his arm gone and started crying. After that he more dangerous with that one arm than the other man is with two. He got less to lose. There's a lot of one-arm men walking around.

So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.

This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.

Turn off the light, she says as she walks away, creating a small woosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.

I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.

And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.