Quotes About Loss

He had known that memories would be stirred if he saw her again. He had known, surely, that somehow he would be hurt by them.

There was loneliness and emptiness without Teddy, she had said. He had news for her. There was always loneliness and emptiness. It was part of the condition of living.

For there was no more friendship and never would be again.

He had reacted to pain and loss in a remarkably immature manner—as usual. Nothing much ever changed in his life, except the incidentals.

The urge to reach for him, to try to somehow soothe him for the loss of a mother years and years ago was almost irresistible.

Teddy. Diana floated on a cushion of fuzziness and wanted him. She wanted the terrible loneliness to go away. But Teddy was dead. He would never be there again.

He rode away from her with the deepest regret.

And so he had lost her before he had ever had a chance of having her. And had determinedly, over the next several years, pushed the pain and the longing into the background of his mind, forced friendship to the fore, and won his battle.

He wanted to be himself again. Except that there was no being himself ever again.

My life came to an end the day I left you. I have lived in hell since then. Were those the feelings of a man who did not know what deep emotion was?

I still miss him. There is a loneliness and an emptiness where he was.

She was engulfed by mingled panic and indecision, and by a terrible depression. She would never see him again. He would come riding out of the stable in a moment and disappear down the driveway, and she would never see him again. Ever.

Ah, Gerard, Gerard , she found herself thinking. Why could you not have remained simply the golden boy of my memories?

A Christmas to remember. For the rest of her life. But how would she remember it? With the ache of sadness and loneliness and loss? With sweet nostalgia?

I am sorry now. I missed an hour of your company. A dreadful thing to miss, he said. Your life will be forever impoverished, Allie.

The next few days were all she could ever have of him.

She had always known deep down that she had never recovered fully from his defection. She had loved him for so long that he had become part of her very being.

He knew that after tomorrow he would try to remember what she looked like and not always succeed.

But there is a difference between thinking of an absent friend and thinking of someone who used to be a friend and never will be again.

Her feelings for him were purely regrets for a past that might have been. He was not now the sort of man whom she would wish to captivate even if that were possible.

After you have broken my heart and left me, I will remember that we are always and ever connected.

Then I thought that once my year of mourning was over and I put off my blacks, I would also put off the worst of my grief. And perhaps that has happened. But sometimes I think that grief is preferable to emptiness. At least grief is something. I have come to realize, I suppose, that they are not just dead. They are gone. There is nothing there where they were.

And so this was the end. The end of a friendship that had brightened his life through most of his adulthood. Not the end of his love. Now that he was conscious of it again, that would live on, perhaps for the rest of his life.

They had talked and talked, planning and dreaming of a future that was not meant to be.