Quotes About Loss

An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.

The thing is, Mom, the secret of happiness is low expectations. That's a good reminder, right there. If you didn't lose your husband and kids all in one year, smile! You're ahead of the game.

Really it was her mother she'd wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.

Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.

fallen hero shatters into more sharp pieces than you'd believe.

When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.

I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

Sometimes the past can vanish.

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten.

on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? ... It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere.

A million dead butterflies, she said. Sorry as hell they ever landed here.

What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past

It wasn't all a waste," she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn't exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face.

Damn April to hell, I could be done with that one. November also. Birthdays, Christmas, dogwoods and redbuds, even football season. Live long enough, and all the things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. the wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

It ran deeper than that. I'd lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn't know, she hadn't loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she'd never been born—not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.

When I got on the line again the operator was asking for more coins, so I dropped them in. Mama and I listened to the weird bonging song and didn't say anything to each other for a little bit. 'I just lost somebody I was in love with,' I finally told her. 'I just told him goodbye, and I'm never going to see him again.

It's terrible to lose somebody, I said, I mean, I don't know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. But it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

I didn't wish to be comforted. "You can't replace people you love with other people," I said. "They're not like old shoes or something." "No. But you can trust that you're not going to run out of people to love.

First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.