Quotes About Loss

It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself when someone had died.

I was fairly sure this death had affected him more than he let show. Then again, I suspect that Julian's cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death kept him from feeling too sad about anything for very long.

The idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything.

Hay cosas tan terribles que no podemos entenderlas inmediatamente. Y hay cosas —desnudas, farfullantes, indelebles tan horrorosas— demasiado terribles para que lleguemos a entenderlas jamás. Sólo más adelante, en la soledad, en la memoria, nos damos cuenta: cuando las cenizas se han enfriado, cuando ya se han marchado los dolientes; cuando miras a tu alrededor y te encuentras, para tu sorpresa, en un mundo completamente diferente.

People die, sure . . . but it's heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness.

Tiene algún sentido saber que termina mal para todos, incluso para los más felices, pues al final todos perdemos lo que importa, y saber al mismo tiempo que, pese a ello, con toda la crueldad que implica el juego, es posible jugar con una especie de alegría?

Às vezes você tem que perder pra ganhar.

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things—naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror—are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself—quite to one's surprise—in an entirely different world.

I'll probably think about it all my life: that candlelit circle, a tableau vivant of the daily, commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her.

the fuck-up from which I would never recover.

My love was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness.

but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm's reach of each other

Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary

Why hadn't I grabbed his arm and begged him one last time to get in the car, come on, fuck it Boris, just like skipping school, we'll be eating breakfast over cornfields when the sun comes up?

when my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these Simon and Garfunkel records.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely

Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

Her death the dividing mark: Before and After.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we shiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?

but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?

What? said Charles, interrupting him. What did you say? You said Julian's gone? I must compliment you, young man, on your grasp of the English language.

commonplace happiness that was lost when I lost her.

And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I had taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I'd left it.